Nerf Guns and Airplanes
January 30, 2024
Sitting in the Atlanta airport. Contemplating the abundance of knowledge I consumed over the last five days at Imaging USA. It wasn’t my first time attending this conference, but there’s something about this time was simply different, somehow.
Total strangers truly invested time to get to know me and extend encouragement in a way I have not experienced before. I feel as though I’m on the brink of something truly amazing and the journey is just beginning, even as the trip winds down and draws to conclusion.
I’m acutely aware of how uncomfortable my chapped lips are. My ears ache from the pressure changes of flying - if you have inner ear issues, I know you understand and feel my pain.
In my peripheral I hear rolling suitcase wheels, gentle conversation amongst strangers, laughter and some jazzy background music. There’s the occasional cough or sneeze. Crinkling food wrappers rustle, sounds of a lunch grabbed on the go. A mom admonishes her kids, “Come on guys, this way,” as she grabs one child’s hand. An exhausted woman is lying down across the seats next to me, gently snoring as she tries to rest - until her phone rang - she jumped as it startled her awake.
You can feel the rumble of the jet engines, rattling the windows and vibrating the floors.
As an inbound plane deboards at our gate, discord is prevalent. The attendant greets the new arrivals, welcoming them to the Atlanta airport, while simultaneously informing them where they can find their connecting flight information. The same mantra is echoed to each person or family; yet said in a soft, pleasant tone that is genuine and kind, “Welcome to the Atlanta Airport, connecting flights and baggage claim, exit right.”
I watch my fellow travelers and acknowledge that chaos and stillness somehow coexist.
There’s so much hustle and bustle in the concourse, for some, and endless waiting for others, as time creeps by and each passing hour feels more like two. Rushing and waiting.
There’s a purpose in the travel. And it’s unique.
A different destination for each person.
We are all strangers in various stages of our journey, but we’re sharing the experience of the airport and the exhaustion of mass public transportation with one goal in mind: arrive at a destination that’s different than where we are right now, even from where we started.
The Imaging USA conference was similar to this in that strangers from all walks of life and from all over the world, came together for the shared experience and passion for photography. We each have the desire to excel at capturing and immortalizing a moment.
The goal is the same: freeze time.
It’s something truly unique. There’s nothing else on earth that has the ability to stop a moment and preserve it for the future. Memories exist only in our minds, unless there’s a visual reference that allows us to experience it once more.
A photograph.
It has the ability stop time and bring us back.
Back to the important moments in our lives; the celebrations and lamentations that encompass a life well-lived. The sights, sounds and feels of a moment only coexisting in your mind in conjunction with the visual reference of a photograph. Once a moment has passed, that moment can never be recaptured, except through a photograph. The past is gone, the present coexistence, and the future awaiting.
What we do matters. Why we do it, matters. Each stranger in this airport is someone’s family. A mother. A daughter. A father. A son. A brother. A sister. An aunt or an uncle. Grandparents. Great-grandparents. Cousins and friends.
Irreplaceable.
Important.
Indispensable.
Inimitable.
The desire I have to create a lasting inheritance that a family will cherish is compelling. The urgency to establish a foundation that allows me to build a relational foundation with my clients is often debilitating.
I do find myself at a divergence that commemorates my reason for picking up a camera in the first place.
I dreamed of being a photographer as a career, desiring to preserve lasting memories for families, but I never fully understood what that entailed until, unprepared, I was propelled into creating full time.
And boy, was I a fish out of water.
Unprepared for the uniqueness of true entrepreneurship.
Why was I unprepared?
This is what I’ve strived for.
Prayed for.
Spent a decade working towards.
I’ve spent countless hours researching and years studying and learning every aspect of capturing life through my lens and all that entails.
I also spent those years raising our children and moving often, as I dutifully and happily followed my husband around the globe during his military career. The constant onslaught of military life and personal demands meant that I didn’t always have a steady client base and was constantly reinventing my business model to accommodate new places and economic markets. My client base shifted, so my scope of work shifted. I did become quite adept at navigating being a newcomer to an often over-saturated market and putting myself out into the community for leads, but it wasn’t enough to keep a steady stream of clientele.
That takes time. And steadiness.
Time was never on my side, as inevitably, we would move again - usually about the same time my marketing efforts were just starting to pay off, and I had inquiries coming in, but then I had to turn them away, as we planned yet another Army adventure.
So, in the lulls, I focused on improving my work.
It’s not lost on my conscience, the similarities in the lack of focus and direction due to constant change and lack of consistency through the years.
My inspired goal: arrive at a destination that’s different than where I am right now.
Push into the legacy of what will be left behind. Not just for my own family, but also in service to my clients.
My work, while continually improving, is stable and consistent and something I am proud of and often excited about creating.
I want my clients to value it, and be excited for it, too.
I want their children to know the importance of seeing themselves on the walls of their homes and in gorgeous handcrafted albums that will become family heirlooms.
I have always offered prints, wall art and albums. This is not a new thing to my business. However, I have never been, for lack of a better word, pushy about them or fully articulated the importance of ensuring my client’s receive them.
I feel I may have done you a disservice. For each of you who has had to come back to me to get “another copy” of your digital images because you lost them when a computer crashed - it’s something I’m happy to have offered you, but…
there should have been more.
At minimum, one gorgeous portrait hanging in your home.
Maybe a gallery wall your friends and family compliment on.
Perhaps an album that your kids can’t wait to look back through - when they’re older and truly begin to understand the investment you made to capture your lives in that moment.
A moment they remember. A moment you can’t get back. They will only be this age once. Time doesn’t work backwards and a moment, once gone - is lost forever.
You may think they don’t care or are annoyed by the photo session, but, as a mom to three young adults, they absolutely do care. Our middle son recently revealed to me that his favorite pictures we’ve ever taken, are the ones taken in our living room in New York. A simpler time, when I think back on it.
Here I am, beating myself up because I spent quite literally every spare moment while my children were young, learning as much as I could about taking a “good” photograph - I felt like I missed out on truly enjoying my children when they were little and actually wanted to be around me.
I think I was wrong. I may have been behind the camera, but I was also documenting our lives. They (our children) were my reason for ever picking up a camera in the first place. Our walls are proof of the places we’ve lived and the experiences they had as military kids.
In this particular instance, for the photos my son was referencing, I was practicing bouncing flash. Trying to improve my skills during a dreary cold Upstate New York winter. Winters in New York can be BRUTAL and I needed to improve my skills to keep up with the onslaught of winter days. Bryan was deployed, again.
The kids were playing with Nerf guns all over the house - up and down the stairs of our beautiful 1893 Victorian home - chasing one another in and out of the dining room, entryway and living room.
They were being so silly and just having a blast! The amazing (and only) family dog we ever had was just lying in the middle of the floor at their feet while they played, unfazed by the chaos around her. I snapped one photo and then another.
Their laughter was joy to my soul. There were fun “serious” photos that they wanted to pose for - but mostly, we captured the simple fun of being a kid when your only playmates on a cold winter day are your brother and your sister.
When the fun time for them, learning time for me, was all done, the artist in me didn’t like the bright yellow of the plastic guns, so I converted all the images to black and white.
I printed them and hung them, framed, as a gallery wall in our home.
From house to house, through all our moves, those portraits followed us and were hung in our home. Always. First New York, then South Korea, Louisiana, Tennessee and now here in our home in Alabama.
Our children knew that they were important to us. Not the pictures themselves necessarily, but the moment - the memories, the children in the pictures. They mattered.
I didn’t think the kids cared that much that I always hung their pictures in the house, until they grew up. Then they told me how much it means to them. They recognize that moment and they remember it and they have a visual reference to it. The moment we captured, matters.
Your moments matter.
I say all this to say, I’m so humbled God gave me the talent to create memories. It’s not something to take for granted, and I am grateful for each and every family who has allowed me to share in the intimate details of your lives. You’ve trusted me to document your unique journey.
Now, you can trust that when you commission me to photograph your family, whether it’s just one special time, or through the years at different amazing stages as your children grow, you will have an heirloom that you can pass down to your children.
A moment, once passed, can never be truly recreated. It’s finite.
Your family is your heritage. Your legacy.
As I close and begin packing to board my final flight home, I hope you will take time to consider that your family, your legacy, is unique and deserves to be preserved, celebrated and remembered.
We can’t wait to serve you, when you’re ready to share your memories with us. - because the ordinary days become the ones we miss the most. ❤️