What a fun session. I’m a little sappy about babies lately, as can be expected ;), but you guys should have seen when she wrapped her legs around the cake and held onto it with her feet and got sprinkles on her toes. ^^)
I feel like just the preparation for maternity leave is encouraging me to love every little second of getting to know new people and visiting new places all while doing the thing I love-capturing special moments.
I didn’t realize how much I would love meeting and getting to know the people I photograph! This family was no exception. They are fun, upbeat and have a thriving, loving young family. Amelia’s mom Emily is actually a wedding planner so it was fun to chat with her about some potential future projects.
This session really brought things full circle for me since taking pictures of Brighten at this age was a really big part of my beginnings as a portrait photographer and this past two years I have worked so hard to make my business thrive like it does today. This week marks a full year of me blogging regularly
I will see if I can link one of my first pictures of Brighten at the end ;).
Happy birthday baby Amelia!
Ok here is an image I found of Brighty around this age (She’s actually 9 months). This was a few months after starting photography (Feb 2019). I can’t believe I’m in year three already!…
[Below I’ve attached a few more details to the story I promised to include that was for some reason is not uploading on instagram the other day.]
…I know that doesn’t sound like much for most professional photographers out there because I feel like they all have these inspiring stories of coming out of womb, camera in hand, or at least leaving college knowing it was their calling but not me! I just started my journey Oct. 2018. I don’t “have the eye” for photography and I didn’t catch on quick. I just practiced for painstaking hours day in and day out. Also probably just regular PAIN without the ‘staking‘ for Trent and Brighten- my main victims of choice in the earliest days (even though they’re too nice to say that).
Stepping back, in July 2018 my aunt changed my life when, out of the blue, she offered me her old camera. I had talked to Trent just a few weeks before about needing a creative outlet to replace baking since finding out my sugar allergy, and photography actually came up as an option- I was interested because my grandma had been a photographer and I kinda wanted to see what she loved about it but I quickly wrote it off telling Trent “pretty much everyone and their sister is a photographer and I don’t want to be the cliché mommy photographer”.
So even after what could have been a the-answer-fell-right-in-my-lap kinda moment I took the camera and brought it home AND… put it on the closet shelf because I was afraid someone would see it! To me it was like I was playing perfectly into the How to Be a Mom Guide: First a child, then a nice camera, then a second child, then a mini-van and pretty soon all your Instagram posts are about the pebble ice at Chick-fil-a, Target Runs, and stuff you found on sale at Hobby Lobby. It was a slippery slope, the way I saw it.
Can you tell I’m one of those people who sees too long of a line at a restaurant and decides it’s overrated without even tasting the food?- it’s not that I wouldn’t try it, it’s just this burning flame inside me saying “BE DIFFERENT ALYSSA” and that’s usually a good thing!
I hope my parents appreciate the fact that, even though they had to put up with me as a teenager, they never had to worry about me doing drugs because that’s what everyone else was doing, haha.
Trent encouraged me and reminded me that- “…who cares what everyone else thinks if you want to do it?!”. So I did!…after he told me that for 3 more months. I took it out of the closet those 3 months later and bought an online beginner photography class for ninety-eight dollars and zero cent. Which seemed like so much to me back then. The rest of 2018 into around February of 2019 I hid my growing love for photography and learned everything I could about it. In February I came out as a MomTog and put up a really cringe-y looking website and all that fun stuff.
Since then I’ve decringe-ed my website (aka complete makeover), shot portraits, weddings and other photos all over the southwest and created a stable online following and presence.
I have pushed myself to shoot at least one session a week since Jan 2020. That was a pivotal year for me with so so much growth! The great thing is even at that aggressive pace I still LOVE it!! So here I am the cliché mommy photographer who doesn’t even mind if people think I’m just an amateur taking pictures of my kid at the park, because I love it. I simply love it! Who knows…maybe the minivan will be next…
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