Welcome and hello. This is a work in progress and an attempt to get back to my photography roots after stepping away not from photography, but from making it a more of a priority. I have been working on a photo project for about 13 years, since a friend was listening to me lament one evening over a beer about how I don’t know where to go or what to do and I missed shooting and having a purpose with photography. He told me to start and think small, which is advice those of us with AuDHD hear often, and know, just never actually use a lot of the times. It’s so very obvious that it becomes too obvious and just flies right by. He stated specifically that I should just carry a camera everywhere again and maybe post a picture once a day and that will slowly build.

He was correct, BTW. I started immediately, made a webpage at first (stilllifecaptured.com), something I was doing at the time anyhow, and dedicated it to posting a photo a day of street photos I took. Then moved on to Tumblr (tumblr.com/stilllifecaptured) and Instagram ( instagram.com/stilllifecaptureddotcom) and various other platforms that I still maintain. 13 years of every day shooting. I did have a couple of blocks of a few months of not doing it as life tends to do big changes, but always came back.

I adore street photography, it is a way to exercise my photojournalism desires, but even more real and telling of the times and the average life of the current day and age. I can’t remember how old I was, but I remember being really little, probably 5 or 6, maybe even 7 or 8, fascinated with magazines like LIFE and books of collections of photojournalism photographs. I would spend so many hours just staring at a couple photos that would grab my attention, usually macabre ones. Not so much for the macabreness but more for the understanding of what made the event happen and what was going on in the background, how people that are in that event were feeling or thinking and what happens immediately after.

Two big ones that stick out are the one of a lady falling to her death from a building, which was an apparent suicide. I remember it so clearly, but I cannot find the image now. I see her falling, she is about 7-8 feet above the ground with an awning of a store in the background, and I think people were inside a window in the background eating. It’s very blurry in my memory and I know memories shift every time you remember them. I know it is not the fire escape breaking one, but that entire photo story was also one that mesmerized me as well.

The other one was the famous Saigon Execution taken during the Vietnam war. The way the Viet Cong Squad leader’s head is reacting to the gun shot at the instant of the shooting, the calmness of the face of the shooter and the person beside him, the street and how it looks in the middle of heavy street fighting, the state of the street and buildings, and mostly, how closely the photographer is to the action. That feeling or precise feeling(s) of what the photographer is going through as well, that hit deep, even as a very young child who really never understood the war or war at all. Just this image of death, and the photographer. I would always look for where the “spirit” was escaping the person in photos of death or the instant/instant right before death as well, or what my understanding of spirit was that was discussed in my small milieu.

I remember being gifted a 110 camera when visiting extended family around this age and took an obnoxious amount of photos. My mother also gifted me a Polaroid camera since at the time, the cost of developing film was pretty costly when you have so many rolls. I can only assume she did this so I would buy my own film for the Polaroid, which was very costly, and understand that I needed to slow my roll on shots. All it really did was get me to use the 110 more often, since it was developed by someone else, thus not out of my lowly allowance. There is a big gap of memory except I know I consistently shot a ton of 110. I vaguely remember 6th and 7th grade where I would bring my 110 with me to school trips and take photos from the bus and of my friends after school. I actually have some of these photos still, and probably the negatives in my massive collection of negatives that I avoid going through.

Around 10th grade my step-father gifted me his SLR, a Pentax, with a huge amount of lenses, from super wide and macro, all the way to some heavy duty zooms. He is an engineer and told me he had bought it for himself many years earlier with the intent to use it, and as an engineer, he understood it technically, but said that I had the “eye” for composition that he did not have and that I could get much better use out of it. I loved that thing so much. I used it all the way through my senior year of high school.

Very early on in high school I knew I wanted to be a photojournalist. I still loved looking at LIFE magazine as often as I could and getting my hands on books and books of photography of the greats. I applied and got a position in the high school year book as a photographer in 11th and 12 grade, as well as becoming the editor of the school newspaper in 11th grade (I was barely in school my senior year, I wasn’t the most present student the last year of school :D, so I stepped away from it that year). Eventually the light cells of the camera went, and I wasn’t fully versed in manual at the time or technically informed of how a camera was used besides as an art tool, so I thought it was doomed and I didn’t have the money to have it fixed.

After graduation, I went on my own and fully enjoyed the time as a heathen teen/early 20’s and completely stepped away from photography. Not on purpose, I had many distractions. I even lost the Pentax and the lenses in this time period.

A little bit after this time period, I reconnected with a friend from high school who was surprised that I wasn’t in a photography job or doing something in photography, he reminded me that there was never a time he saw me that I didn’t have a camera attached to me. This was about 8-9 years after high school. This comment surprised me because I was in the middle of a crisis with myself that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life and I felt I never had a calling for something, and I had completely forgotten how important art and photography were in my life. It was just gone so much that he shocked me hard with that statement.

Plus I was flattered that such a thing was expected of me and saddened that I had let it slip so much from my being. From that moment on, I picked up a camera again and it never left my side for another 13ish years.

In that time I attended school for photojournalism and developing (my two favorite classes), and worked on my own stuff, doing freelance for various things. I also started my own portraiture studio, and was hired for several local papers, first as a freelance photographer, then as a staff photographer, eventually becoming an editor as well. The best time during this was living in the Space Coast area, 30 minutes south of Kennedy Space Center, and my beats were the launches and various other events in the area. Growing up there and being so fascinated with space and technology involved in it, to be able to be part of it in a way that I loved, was a lifetime high. I got to cover the end of the space shuttle years, the last time the famous countdown was used, had many opportunities to shoot the inside and outside of “my building” (what I have always called the VAB) before it became available to the general public, and worked on many other cool assignments.

During this time, I also went to a school for photography on the other side of the state, which ended up being a was a big waste of money, and later was shut down, and then moved back to the Space Coast after a couple of years. I also had my four children and explored many other types of photography. A very cool one was food photography. My husband at the time was a very good cook, and writer. This was before the big explosion of food blogs and their popularity picked up. I would spend a lot of time watching him cook and just taking photos of it occasionally. At that time I was already a couple of years into taking photos of my food with my big camera before eating it. I read this great book on styling, editing and food photography, and that one book changed my images for the better immensely.

We started doing entire meals, with him planning out interesting ones to build a blog around, and me shooting the entire process in a photojournalistic way, as was my style. At the time, it was one of the first that was like that. He focused more on cooking techniques than actual recipes. It actually ended up doing really well, gaining a big following, taking us on many trips, and getting us invited to some very cool events to cover. My favorite was the American portion of the national chef competition of Bocuse d’Or. I was offered a press photographer pass and basically had free rein of the competition, meeting so many amazing chefs and personalities, including the chef greats. We were also invited, at no cost, to the the event dinner, which at the time was something like ~$300 (probably about $500-$1000 these days) per person, getting to dine with the upcoming and established chefs.

It was an unbelievable experience to not only shoot, but to be a part of. I loved every part of that time period. I learned so much about food photography, we were part of this very close food bloggers community that was just emerging, and the access to more photography knowledge was constant. I don’t miss the cold dinners. Unfortunately, shooting every important step of him making the dinner and then doing the final plating and styling of the shot meant by the time we ate it, it was usually cold. But it was even then, still amazing. The site hasn’t been updated in probably about 10 years, but the posts can be found here: https://www.fotocuisine.com/search?q=Bocuse+d%27Or

After that time period, the younger kids were getting older and we had little time to do it anymore and this is when I slowly just started to step away from photography. I did a few years as a family portrait and wedding photographer, but that was never really something I liked doing. It got to the point were I was only taking bookings that were recommended to me via word of mouth, and even then, it was rare that I accepted. I was just burned out.

This became the time period when my soul started crying out that something was missing and I had that conversation with my friend at a bar and was encouraged to just start with a project.

Since then, I have been chugging along, taking photos as often as I can, and eventually went back to school for neuropsychology before starting work on my master’s degree. Four years ago, I reconnected with my very first boyfriend from when I was 16 and he was 18. We hadn’t spoken or known anything about each other in 32 years. We have been together ever since, and surprise - he is a photographer as well. He never transitioned into digital photography, however, and I had barely touched film since discovering digital in the early 2000s.

He reintroduced me to the wonder of old film cameras and developing, and I have slowly been learning how to repair and use the many old cameras I’ve collected over the past 20 years. He has also started learning how to use my digital cameras. Now we go out almost daily just to shoot with the numerous cameras we’ve acquired, along with the ones we’ve repaired, and then come home to develop film and edit photos. It has completely relit my fire for photography, and I finally feel ready to step back out into the world with it again, explore new opportunities, and try new things.

And here we are.

It’s been a journey, and I have loved it all, but now I am trying out a new path, seeing where this will lead me and how fulfilling it will be. Stay tuned and come along with me. I assure you, as everything else in my life, it is certain to be interesting.