Outside of the studio I’m a mom, a wife and a journalist. In each of these roles, I tell stories - either to my kids or to the world. But for the better part of two decades I’ve been telling stories from behind a camera. Playing with settings. Capturing moments. Chasing sunsets. And it all started in high school.

As an early teenager I remember opening the doors to the tiny camera shop in my town and being hit with the smell of darkroom chemicals. I eyed the cameras, picked out the one I wanted, and paid the owner $50 to lay it away for me. For weeks I showed up with whatever money I had made through odd jobs, and I slowly paid down the bill. Two months later I walked out of that shop with my first SLR, a Pentax MZ30. It occupies a very proud spot in my studio today.

When I landed my first job, which was in a photolab of course, I slugged the hours developing other people’s pictures so that I could sit down at the end of my shift and run my own canisters through the developer. Countless nights were spent in my school’s darkroom, developing my own black and white prints. And much of my hard-earned dollars went towards film and the cost to develop the negatives.

So in 2020 during the middle of Covid lockdowns and my second maternity leave, I built a photography studio in our house. I’d never shot a single studio session before but I knew I was drawn to stunning portraits and I wanted to create them.

Turns out I love it.