How Did I End Up Here?

I grew up here in Colorado, Longmont to be exact, and was always interested in art. As a little girl I drew pictures of my enormous family pretty much every time I sat down to draw something. (Was this a premonition of what my life’s work was to become?) One of my favorite things to do was scrapbook snapshots of my friends and family with my Mom by my side. Scrap-booking was a fairly new phenomenon back then and you had to order everything “acid-free” from a Creative Memories consultant. Had I known that one day there would be huge stores full of every pattern of paper and more stickers than I could’ve imagined, I think I would have died from happiness. I still scrapbook today much to the amusement of my mid-20’s hipster friends. But, I digress. I continued to enjoy drawing all the way through high school and decided my major in college was to be art, much to my Dad’s chagrin:)

Not knowing much about the art world and what would sustain me, I figured drawing would be a wasted major and chose to try photography instead. I LOVED it. My first real, completely manual camera was a Canon AE-1 from 1980. In fact, I still have that camera even though I haven’t developed a lot of film since graduating from Metro in late 2004. That camera stuck with me through 4 years of photo assignments that I somehow managed to complete between my full course load, my two-three jobs at a time, and, of course, socializing and finding some great friends.

The assignments were varied and absorbing at photography school. We had the mundane: photograph different colored fruits and then figure out how to get the color correct on the temperamental color processor aptly nicknamed “Hope” since that was the brand of machine she was, as well as what you needed to bring with you to get any work done before she inevitably broke down. I also had my share of fun and quirky projects, for example I was ordered in one class to photograph “the unknown.” If you were to look back at my college work, you’d probably be surprised to find that I rarely had any people in the photographs. This was not by choice, but because of circumstance. There are more buildings and inanimate objects ready for a photo-shoot at midnight than people

Which was why… I was so excited for school to be over! I could finally have some time to photograph the things that I wanted to photograph most: People! At first I didn’t have a studio, but I soon found that I preferred to shoot outside and on-location. I started mainly photographing babies and little kids, and found that to be extremely satisfying. Babies and Children are still my favorite subjects. When they are really young, children haven’t developed that guardedness of being in front of a camera that most of us adults seem to have.

I have since gotten the chance to photograph older kids, kids in high school, entire extended families, sports teams, weddings, engagements and many others and what I’ve found is that I just really like to make photographs of people being themselves, but looking their best. There is nothing more satisfying than hearing from my clients that they are in love with their pictures, and I hope that I get to do it again and again. Every day I am thankful that this is my career and that I get to learn and improve and meet new people. It’s exciting and I wouldn’t have it any other way!