Ok, so this is really a tough thing for me to do. I’m lingering on the fence of professionalism vs. personal when it comes to sharing my personal life on my professional photography blog. But I think it’s incredibly important to share not only the great things in life but also the bad things. I don’t want to live a “Facebook” life where I only project the best things happening. I want to be completely open and honest with my clients. I want to have real meaningful relationships with people I photograph, because photographing someone can be and is a really intimate and personal thing. My clients should feel like they can relate to me on some level before we meet. I want others to know that they can talk about the bad things in life and not be ashamed. We ALL go through things! It doesn’t have to be such a bad thing to talk about. If this means I lose clients who want me to photograph them, then I guess they are just not the type of clients I’m looking for.

These self portraits are incredibly personal, I’m sorry if you are offended.

One of my first, but the assignment called for a self portrait, as well as a supporting image. I started drawing on myself when I was younger for multiple reasons; to hide scars, to create, and as an alternative or substitute for other things. It helped me so much in climbing out of that deep dark hole that is depression. This photo was really healing to me. It was a look back into where I was, and how far I’ve come to where I am today.

Oh, and no, and my room is NOT that clean, lol. Also, I painted that picture on the wall (super proud of myself)

I need to first start off with this image saying that this was not my original idea, I found a conceptual photographer named Christian Hopkins and decided to attempt the same image. His work is insane and I would highly recommend you check out his Photography.
So this assignment was called the “Brooke Shaden Challenge” and if you look up her work, you’ll connect the dots. You can find her work here. It was more a fun challenge to see what concepts we could come up with in photography.

“Coming Undone”

“Fantasy”

“The Struggle”

This is really different for me. Sitting here actually sharing more personal thoughts and things that have happened in my life, writing them down for a larger audience than I’ve ever shared in front of before. I hope something positive comes of this. I want to reflect on my time in school, how incredibly fast this whole process went even though it was a full two years of my life. I completely devoted myself to studying photography for two years in post secondary (well besides planning my wedding in the middle of it, a task in itself) and feel it has been a great investment of my time. Besides learning on my own and still learning after school, I’ve grown SO MUCH as a photographer, but also in myself. I’ve grown in my values, my goals in life have finally become more clear, I’ve grown up, opened up to the possibilities my life holds.