I’ve been challenged recently to share more of my story – what drives my soul – what made me become a photographer.  While I really dislike putting myself out there and making myself vulnerable, I really want the world to know the reason behind why I chose photography. My little Boo and I recently took a Mother-Daughter Spring Break trip to Florida and she captured these very rare images of me on the beach – my happy place!  I never enjoy being in FRONT of the camera, but I hope you can relate to my WHY story as to the reason I allowed myself to be in front of the camera for a change….. with my crazy wind blown hair, gray roots, and pudgy middle.

Why Photography?

Hey there! I’m Heather! With the recent relaunch of my photography business, I’ve had lots of new followers so I wanted to officially introduce myself and share with you WHY I chose to be a photographer. First of all just a bit about me! I’ve been married 27 years and I’m momma to three girls, and two sweet babes in heaven. I love my fur babies aaaaaaaalmost as much as my girls and can be found most days driving back and forth to the dance studio, cleaning and organizing my home, or Learning-Learning-Learning more about photography, SEO, marketing, social media and the million other things I need to know to run my business well.

I started my little photography side hustle over 11 years ago, and the reason I started it then compared to the reason I am pouring my heart and soul into it now has changed a bit. Having only a small handful of photographs of myself as a child made me completely overcompensate taking photos of my own family, which is what started my love of photographs. After a few rough years personally, I started to lose my passion for photography and was thinking I didn’t even want to continue to pursue my business anymore. But you know what? All those crazy hard things we go through and don’t understand WHY at the time, always has something much more beautiful waiting for you on the other side. Our pastor recently described it as the ingredients of a cake – would you eat flour by itself if you could choose to? or eat just butter? or raw eggs? Probably not. But once all those not so great things by themselves gets mixed together and go through a REALLY HOT oven, then something better than we can ever imagine comes out the other side.

This beautiful mess of life we are living in…… it deserves to be documented. Every. Single. Moment. The simplest moments are to me the ones I love to remember the most. The hard moments too…. guess what? The hard moments are what make us into something so much more beautiful and meaningful that we ever could have hoped for without them. I’m just now coming into a season of falling in love with who I truly am, unashamedly, with all the scars. I’m learning to love myself and to fall in the love with the path of deep healing. I’m no longer hesitant to become the best version of myself and no longer am trying to be the person everyone else thinks I should be. I am ME, and I’ve been given a GIFT, and my biggest passion right now is to use that gift to its utmost potential. It’s super scary to put myself out there but I just know this is the journey laid out before me so I’m jumping in with both feet! Heck – I don’t even like sharing a photo of myself – but I want to show every. person. I. can. just how incredibly beautiful you are. Your imperfectly perfect self. Get in front of the camera (like I did!) and document your beautiful messy life. You are ENOUGH, and you are BEAUTIFUL, just exactly the way you are. So often the image we have of ourselves is so very different than what others see. I want to show you just how beautiful you are. 

Much Love,

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