Memories of why I started photography. I’ve been taking pictures for a long time. I remember being at my girlfriends house, there was an end table by the IKEA couch, a blue coffee mug and the brick wall. My eyes saw a photo there, I took the shot, shared it and the photo was admired. 

I was at my favorite seafood restaurant and there was this crane game. If you caught a live lobster with the crane, he was free as your meal. A family had caught one and they were trying to take a photo of this lengthy red crawly creature of a lobster before the kitchen took it back to become a meal. I friendly suggested, “hold it like this, let the light reflect like so, hold your phone to take the photo from this angle.” 

I was always taking photos with my cell phone. Maybe it started with the fanciest of phones I can remember first being a pink blackberry and then every IPhone after til even today. 

2011, 2012ish I began my journey of photos with abstract hearts. I was seeing them often, periodically to sparsely, but they jumped out at me as if they were a message that I was to share. I could have been running, driving and saw them in the clouds even once. Food at times, graffiti, always a pleasant surprise, but they were never counted if they were shaped perfectly like Cupid’s heart. I’d share them on Facebook, Instagram to the point where someone would message them privately to me or by text. I was asked too to make prints of them to send with a friend on her trip to Africa for children’s art projects. I contemplate often what I could still do with my collection. 

My best friend from high school, her daughter was graduating high school and she asked me if I would take some photos for her senior year and I said yes, of course. With that money I purchased my first “real” camera and more photography took off from there. The business side. Valentine sessions, Easter and bunnies, Christmas mini sessions, to meeting the same families year after year and getting Christmas cards from them in the mail. I had even rented a space for about a year and it was cutesy, but 80% of what people wanted I learned was outside in a natural space. I started to not enjoy some of the work worrying about paying the rent and for electricity, but it was a good experience. I didn’t want to chase for the passion and money was not important to me. 

I have captured memories, engagement photos, weddings, kisses, perfect smiles, tears and smashed cakes. Baby announcements, a man in his underwear and his beautiful wife in her favorite yoga pose, a hilarious 80’s looking Christmas card. Littles hugging their Moms, baby hands and feet, Dads with their little girl or boy and I really can’t pick a favorite. Matching Converse shoes, laughter from bloopers, and the stories that little ones tell me. My favorite from this past Christmas was Miss Quinn telling me her Daddy is naughty. “He’s naughty because he says bad words!” 

Now my brain is flooding with memories. I was told I encouraged a friend to take more photos, and he’d share his adventures with me. I mean we kinda enjoy and live through one another’s photos, don’t we? We are all on our own separate journeys, but with photos from the now, the past we take each other places with our eyes and stories. My heart is just in it, to create and share with others. Do, create, chase what you love.. you never know what the adventure may develop to.