My Journey to owning a photography studio
I OFTEN AM ASKED HOW I GOT STARTED IN BOUDOIR… AND PHOTOGRAPHY in general.
The answer is complicated and a bit long. I have always been an artist, I think it is something deep within my soul. From my earliest days in preschool, I could be found with a pencil or crayon and some paper, drawing things I saw. I was very obsessed with drawing horses (and horses, period), which lasted into my late teens.
In high school, Art, Ceramics, Psychology, and Sociology were my favorite classes. I loved art and figuring out the human mind. I was good at drawing but I was awful at ceramics! Seriously, I was so bad! But I loved it because it was therapeutic for me in a way. Not much feels as calming as throwing a block of clay on a wheel and shaping it with your hands, or sculpting something right from your imagination even if you are bad at it.
In art class I drew a lot of naked fairies flying through space, which resulted in arguments with my art teacher, Mrs. Cupitt, about how many black Prisma color pencils I was going through. Some of that work still hangs in friends’ homes today and I wonder what Mrs. Cupitt would think of my profession today!
After high school, I enrolled in our community college.
In college, I first majored in Psychology. I wanted to be an art therapist and help heal people through the creation of art. Art is so healing. It makes you feel things when you look at it, it helps you exorcize the mental demons trapping you. But I quickly realized it was not for me – and I was not following the path that talent had already laid for me. So after just one semester, I switched to double-major in Fine Arts, with a heavy focus on studio and figure drawing, and Graphic Design.
A lot of people comment on my composition and attention to details, such as light and shadow and the way it affects photographs. Truth be told, these are skills I honed during drawing class in art school and they are the reason my work looks like it does today.
Very ironically, I absolutely hated photography in college, and I would often turn my nose up at it as “easy” art. In fact, I failed Photography 101….TWICE. Trust me when I say, there is nothing easy about photography; I was just being lazy because I hated developing my own film by hand! Hahaha!
And to bring this full circle, the work I do now is a kind of art therapy in and of itself. Many of my clients have told me their boudoir session was better than therapy. If that’s not a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is!
SO HOW DID THAT TRANSLATE INTO A PHOTOGRAPHY BUSINESS?
Well, I’ve always had a camera in hand. In fact, my very first camera was given to me by my dad when I was just 8 years old. It was a hot pink Concord camera, the kind that took the 110 film that looked like a parentheses and you had to wind it up for the flash to fire! As a child of the 90s, I took a LOT of photos of everything I saw. I still have most of them boxed away!
During winter break my freshman year of college, my stepdad was diagnosed with stage 4b lung cancer, the most advanced stage a person can have. That is the “gather-loved-ones-to-say-goodbye” death knell. I spent all of my college years living at home and commuting to school, plus learning how to inject medicine into his PICC line, occasionally taking him to the hospital for oncology visits when my mom couldn’t (where I would run his wheelchair down the hospital corridors as fast as I could before letting him go while he laughed), and watching him put himself through hell in the form of chemotherapy, radiation, and clinical trials to try to eke more moments out of his limited time left.
He passed away after a four-year battle in February of 2003. To put it simply, this experience devastated me. It was then that I set down all my pencils, my camera, and anything else remotely resembling art. I didn’t touch it again for over ten years. I was left feeling bereft: of my parent and my art. But I could no longer see my art.
But artist blood runs through my DNA and that is hard to avoid. Both of my parents are artists. My mother has always created collectible things, and since 1992 she has been an international, multi-award-winning collectible Teddy Bear artist, with customers from all over the globe collecting her work. My dad was also a photographer and he used to dream about opening his own studio and photographing fashion.
In the fall of 2015, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I flew down to Florida to visit with him post-op and I took my little starter camera with me, because I had an increasing interest in photography again. It was on that trip, during a sunset “expedition” to the local marina in Julington Creek where the sun spun amazingly beautiful colors in the sky, that I watched my dad appreciating that sunset. A literal fire was born in me. I’ve said before that it was during that sunset when my purpose came crashing back to me after a more than ten year hiatus. As if the fiery color of the clouds and sky beamed down into my heart. Suddenly, I knew what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be, and it all snowballed from there. In 2016, I legally opened my business and in 2017, I decided my heart belonged in boudoir, helping women realize they are beautiful NO. MATTER. WHAT.
My dad passed away in September 2020 but his legacy lives on through me and my business as I do the work he always dreamed about.
