02/13/2023
Some creative shop talk for you this morning—I meant for this to be brief but it’s me, after all… 🫠
Like many, I seem to constantly reassess my business at the beginning of the year (and every year), and I find myself wanting to focus more and more on what I really love doing. And that is creating beautiful portraits. “Lifestyle” photography is a broad brush of a term, but it’s the genre I thought ten years ago I would focus on forever. The candid moments, the documenting of real life. And while two of my favorite sessions center on this theme (Birth + First 48), my creative desires for my milestone/children/family sessions are evolving.
As I acknowledge this shift in my thinking, I want to acknowledge (because sometimes this is an unpopular opinion)—it is ok to simply want “formal” family photos. And I say this only because if this is you, I get it. It’s me too. When we do our own family photos, my biggest desire is for simplicity. I want nice, clean, well-lit shots of us together, maybe in a location that is meaningful to us. I’m an introvert in many ways, and I don’t want to be asked to do forced prompts to create a manufactured moment. Please know, I have many photographer friends who are incredibly skilled at capturing the candid, and who take the most ✨beautiful✨photos of the in-between moments, and this is a needed and beloved genre of our field. But it’s not always me. Sometimes, yes—I will absolutely snap those moments if they happen naturally. But I can feel my creative desires shifting back to—interestingly enough, what I focused on for my BFA—portraiture.
These past few months have been spent investing quite a bit of time and resources into re-learning and re-building my knowledge of lighting, and posing, and while I’m still offering all my normal sessions for the time being, I’m excited to try some old/new things with you. As always, I appreciate you sticking with me 💕💕