One of the questions that I get very often is how did I get started in photography. My photography journey has been a long one and something that I always have had an interest in. I had sort of an interesting childhood since I had a father who is an oil painter. He originally worked doing interior design (traveling a lot) and when I was 11 quit his job to be home more with us and began painting full time. We attended tons of gallery openings, and shows growing up. On vacations there would always be something art related we would be running off to see (we went and saw the Van Gogh exhibit when I was like 9 or 10, I wish I knew how neat that was then.) We were constantly around art.
Once I hit high school my parents gave me my first film camera and I took classes through high school. Once I got into college I spent a couple years thinking I wanted to pursue a medical field and then eventually ended up back in art classes and graduated with my degree in Art and Visual communications with my emphasis in photography and design. It actually took me awhile until I became interested in portrait photography, most of what I did through high school and college was landscape mostly because I think that I didn’t realize I could take pictures of people and actually make money doing so. Also I was terrified of children, I never was much of a babysitter and I had zero idea what to do with them.
Upon graduation, I found a job working in a studio in Salt Lake for a year. It was there that my passion for children and babies began. I was doing 5-6 sessions daily, the majority of them being families and children. I learned quickly ways to work with them, differences between older children and younger ones, things that get real expression, ways to quickly pose little ones, and how to deal with totally uncooperative kids. It was very hard, but it was also good with how much I learned through trial and error that year. After a year working there I was completely burnt out. The 1300 or more sessions I had done had left me questioning my passion for photography. I left and took some time off.
About 9 months later I started back up again this time on my own terms with how many sessions I would take monthly. Over the past couple years I have done lots of different kinds of photography and babies, children, and their families have become the thing I love the most. My passion for this grew deeper after having my own kids and realizing how quick time goes and how fast they grow up. I love being able to document the important milestones kids have and preserving memories of them that are gone so fast.
