As far as I can recall, I first became interested in photography when I was around 13 or 14. There was a creek and heavily graffitied bridge near my house and I would go there to take pictures of nature. I also did a couple of photo shoots with a friend of mine. One of these shoots had to be done twice because on the way the first time around I fell off my bike going down a hill as we were heading to the location and I got a concussion and woke up hours later.

My camera then, as now, was a hand me down DSLR from my dad and I’m really thankful that the camera survived the fall. Other than a brief, inexplicable malfunction when my husband and I went to the Canary Islands in November 2018, it has been working like a dream.

It was time for me to upgrade my cell phone earlier this year and really the only specs I cared about were how good the front and back facing cameras were. I think at this point my new phone’s camera is better than my what, fifteen? year old DSLR. I was also browsing SkillShare’s free classes on photography and came across a class on mobile photography, which I immediately looked through. It didn’t have much that I didn’t already know, but it did inspire me to put in more effort into all those family photos I had been taking. And it introduced me to Snapseed, which is a nice little (free) editing app (though it’s from Google, which is super problematic).

I had also been thinking about dipping my toes into the social media waters in the past couple months or so. I ultimately settled on Instagram, where I already had an account but seldom used it. I found the woman who did our wedding photos and along with weddings she also does creative/fantasy photo shoots and looking through her feed really inspired me to pick photography back up, and I hatched a plan (a photo shoot plan).

V