ngg photography: it all began with... {whales!}

Tonight, after packing up my desktop to take home and set up on my lap in bed (yes, I said Lap… When it’s totally flat out, I pack up my computer from work and set it up in bed so I can work right in front of the tv and keep an eye on Criminal Minds and Grey’s anatomy while still working until the wee hours of the morning. It works pretty well, only my big, fat, widescreen monitor gives me numb legs every now and then… I REALLY need a new laptop!) Anyway, being crazy busy got me to thinking about where it all began. I remember back when I just started taking bookings, and the total kick I would get out of noting it in my diary. I would proudly slap “BOOKED” across my whole ‘day to a page’ schedule for a 1 hour family portrait. I was SO excited!

so then that got me to thinking about how I ever came to pick up a camera. I’m not one of those photographers that got their first camera at age 2 and they’ve been trigger happy ever since. I wish I was, it sounds so… romantic (…?) I have always been into art and ran into the standard photography modules in high school, but my photography skills pretty much consisted of happy snaps. That was, until… whales! I LOVE whales! They are so big and slow and peaceful and strong and beautiful and musical. One of the most fave things Brett and I do is sit up at ‘our spot’ in the warm winter sun with our goofy binoculars glued to our eyes for hours and watch all the whale families pass by. We even have a little patch in the ocean we like to call ‘the dance floor’ where, when even the most mundane whale passes, it seems to rejoice in all it’s splendor and go nuts breaching and tummy sunning and fin flapping! One day we were up at ‘our spot’ and the most amazing thing happened! Two whales decided to pull a 360 and make a B-line into the mouth of the river and swim upstream! Brett and I jumped into the car with adrenalin pumping and raced down to the river. As people started running to the river from far and wide to behold this phenomenon, I grabbed my little compact camera to cover the story so I could share this experience with the world! Well, as you know, compact digital cameras have this totally FRUSTRATING habit of delaying the moment from when you press the shutter for about 3 seconds until it takes the photo. This made it particularly hard for my early armature photographer self, as the whales are were surprisingly quick at doing spectacular things. After the whales decided to leave the river and keep migrating, Brett came to check out the pics. As we scrolled through photo upon photo of bow wave we decided we needed an SLR. (sidenote: we did somehow manage to get like 3 reasonable photos to the daily news which ended up making front page of the newspaper! :)

Within weeks we purchased our first SLR, Penny, and the rest is history…

So there you have it! A looooooooong post about the beginning. :) It’s so incredible how everything just snowballed after that. I really can’t believe how blessed I am to be doing what I love with people I love everyday, Amen!

And because post need pics, here are a few of my desk buddies that keep me going throughout the day :)