So, it’s Thursday and I honestly cannot believe it! This week went by so quickly and I am so thankful. I did not really have anything going on last weekend except that I check out of my unit and am moving on to bigger, more fabulous things.
Last night, as I was wrapping up the editing for Pete and Anastasia’s wedding, I was talking to one of my best friends and she told me that she was proud of me. This made me look back and think about how I started and how far I have come. I’ve always dug photography. I took film photography in high school and LOVED everything about film photography… from developing my own film to exposing my images in the darkroom and processing them. I even used to say that I will have a darkroom in my house. My first digital camera was this big, bulky thing the size of CD case but not nearly as thin. It used those 3.5” disks! Remember those?! From there I had a couple Sony cybershots and was always taking pictures, mostly of my beautiful cousins.
The summer of 2012 after I returned home from Afghanistan, I decided I wanted a DSLR. I remember asking Alex to buy it for my birthday and he immediately asked what happened to the one he bought me the year before. The year before he had gotten me and Olympus Tough camera to take to Afghanistan with me. I was in complete shock when I received it. I had remembered mentioning that I wanted a freezeproof, waterproof, shockproof camera to take with me, but I hadn’t imagined him getting me one. I still have that wonderful thing and it comes with me when I do go out for adventures, which has been seldom now that Alex is in California.
I got a Canon Rebel T3i initially. I shot a handful of sessions with it and then decided with no reasoning to switch to a Nikon and I haven’t looked back ever since. I’ll admit, my first few sessions were shot in auto. I couldn’t recall much from the classes I took in high school and I was most certainly using the awful kit lens. But I did quickly learn manual, I didn’t perfect it, but I understood the basics. My friends we all models for me and I quickly realized how stressed and nervous working with children made me. I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have my own children yet, or what, because I love kids and babies, but trying to photograph them wore me out. I would always go home hoping that I had at least 15 good images. I learned that not all kids love the camera and will happily models like my cousins did. That’s when I decided that I wanted to start second shooting with other photographers and start building a wedding portfolio. I second shot my first wedding with Stacey Windsor and I loved it. It was fun, it was emotional and it was a lot less stressful for me than uncooperative littles.
Now here I am solely focusing on engagements, weddings and anniversaries and I couldn’t be more excited about this journey, my business and where it will all go from here!
Here is a image of my first session with my good friend Michelle and her husband Gio in November of 2012 that I shot in auto with my Canon Rebel and an image from Pete & Ana’s wedding last month in fully manual with my Nikon D750.
