Three months have slipped by since my last newsletter - and it has been years since I blogged. So here I am, starting fresh! As I was brainstorming what to share (spring sessions! branding work! weddings!) I kept returning to something a client said to me during a family session this past fall. It was a casual comment but one that really touched me to the core and feels worthy of rumination:

“Your pictures make me feel things. We've had other pictures taken and they are beautiful but they don't make me feel anything.”

Blair Conway of Snow Hill, a longtime client and amazing mom of two boys, said out loud the very thing I quietly strive for everyday in my art and business. I hugged her on the spot. I was so taken by her observation that I played it over and over in my head driving home that evening and still today, months later.

Her comment reminded me of another client in Wilson who told me that what she wanted to remember most (and what she hoped I could capture in photos) was the jumble of elbows and knees of her gangly tweens lumped together on the sofa. “We are often a pile of legs," she said.

Plenty of other clients tell me they just want to remember how life feels right now.

If there's one thing I'm chasing every time I pick up my camera it is to make pictures that make us feel something. Sometimes I think I achieve it and sometimes I don't. But I'm always chasing it and learning and playing and experimenting and messing up along the way.

Infinite gratitude to the clients who keep me going.