Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Sometimes shoots are soft and cozy in the little spare bedroom of my apartment. I’ll light candles and play HAIM and we’ll hang out on the floor and chat while we shoot. Sometimes we run around the city and sweat profusely and I’ll get nervous and awkward shooting in public and we end the day with a beer and a vegan barbecue sandwich. I love both scenarios, so much. Working with Hannah was the latter. I had the best freakin day with her and the photos make my heart sing. 

We started at the Chrysler museum. I think this was subliminally inspired by the Apeshit video, but I can’t be sure. the light was fickle but when it came out for more than a millisecond, it was so dreamy.

when we found this painting I was completely overwhelmed. it was so, damn, beautiful.

and then we made our way to a community garden in Norfolk where it was so damn hot and bright and beautiful. the epitome of summer. may fall never ever come. 

Hannah moves through the world with the most beautiful confidence and she literally. freakin. glows.

favorite favorite favorite

these leaves were so damn beautiful. it just worked. 

the prettiest human in the world probably!!!

we did these photos at my apartment and I could not be more thrilled with how they turned out. the balcony gets grade-A golden hour light and it showed up BEAUTIFULLY on film. 

our bedroom has east facing windows and isn’t very bright past the morning so I was a little uneasy about shooting in there. I’m so glad we did.

matisse forever

these three ^ V are some of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken.

I’ve worked with heather several times before (starting with her senior portraits). It’s always been my favorite thing about being a photographer- you watch people grow into new roles in their lives and new parts of their personhood. The shift in heather’s energy that came with the news of a BABY on the way was palpable and freaking beautiful. When we were figuring out what we wanted the vibe of the photos to be, we settled on serene, feminine, grounded. This session followed some scary, unexpected news about her pregnancy and despite these things, she was as graceful and peaceful as I’ve always known her to be. 

what struck me most is how damn brave heather is. for being so young and taking this new chapter head on, for sharing her pregnancy so eagerly, for telling her story so openly. I aspire to navigate life with that level of grace and balance. 

heather has been blogging about her pregnancy at www.honeybeesandheather.wordpress.com

its kind of weird to be writing this a month after getting scans back and three thousand miles away from where these photos were taken. Hi from my favorite coffee shop in Norfolk! This was my last shoot before leaving Portland and it was the highest note to end on. I picked Sarah up at the CRACK of dawn and we drove though the gorge as the sun was rising (magic) with plans to shoot at Rowena crest with the wild flowers. 

our plans changed when we got out of the car and realized it was SO freaking windy. and cold. and we couldn’t even hear each other over the gusts. We snapped a few and then went and drove half-aimlessly, half expectedly around the gorge. the results of this unplanned plan-b were better than I could have dreamed up

Oregon is so damn beautiful and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a twinge of something like homesickness when I look at this photo. 

It’s definitely worth noting that we scaled a damn cliff to get these photos so high up. It was scary and so worth it.

 SO STRONG AND BEAUTIFUL. Sarah has an absolutely amazing story and she’s such a badass and so so so sweet and had the best energy and optimism and eagerness. 

I had visited Portland once in the summer of 2017 before I moved there a year later. it was two blissful weeks in sunny stretch of June and mused in my journal that it “didn’t feel real. this all feels like a dream.” and so I went home, got my college degree, packed my things and drove back to build a life here. I realized early on that Portland wouldn’t be a permanent place. I liked it but I wasn’t eager to establish deep  roots in the PNW. initially, the plan was to stay through the summer since it’s insanely, unfathomably beautiful here as soon as the rain clears, but after a quick change of housing situation and a big “follow your intuition/look for the path of least resistance” sort of week, my boyfriend and I decided to move back to Virginia, to return home, just like dozens of other prodigal wanderers from our neighborhood in Norfolk. 

I’d always wondered how our little neighborhood had such a magnetism to it, that so many would return after a great, big move and I’m humbled to finally understand why. Since being here, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of home. It’s a concept and feeling and philosophy that occupies so many of my waking thoughts, and I’ve tried to figure out why home is such a force to be reckoned with. Why no matter how meticulously I planned my move, how aggressively I forced myself to get out and do things that made Portland such an attractive city, no matter how comfortable my bed, how beautiful the coast, how tall the trees and how abundant the flowers, I felt like I was still floating through an extended, working vacation. 

I’m a very weather empathic person and the eight months of rain wrung me dry in a way that a winter never has. Going so long without seeing the sun made me feel like a zombie and by April I was waking up furious that it was still cold and gray and drizzling. Of course, I knew that Portland was a city known for its constant rain, but I had no idea that it would zap my motivation so entirely. I heard time and time again that the summer makes it all worth it, and the taste of warmth and sun that I’ve gotten has made me wistful to maybe stick it out, but I can’t justify being miserable and uninspired for eight months a year just because (like almost everywhere) the summer here is beautiful.

When talking to a friend last spring about my plans to head west she agreed that Portland was beautiful and interesting and a fun city but it lacked diversity. it sat heavily with me because it was something I hadn’t noticed when I visited and hadn’t considered before deciding to move. I came from a city that was 47.1% white (and 43% black), where as Portland is 80.5% white. Politically, Norfolk ranks as “mostly even” where as Portland is staunchly liberal. I had thrown myself into a bubble of people who mostly looked like me, thought like me, were raised like me, and liked to do the same things I did. I rarely felt out of place here, which means I rarely felt challenged. When my dad came to visit in April, I was mortified when I found myself in a heated debate about gun control in a popular brunch spot and could feel the disdain from neighboring tables. As long as we have been going to lunch together, we have been having these sorts of conversations. I am absolutely liberal, but this was the first time that I was embarrassed to be having a well informed conversation with my dad just because he dissented from the overarching way of the city and being associated with someone who is absolutely conservative made me feel out of place. To be so surrounded by homogeny was so comfortable and so damn limiting.

The aesthetic shops with $40 bath salts and $80 vintage jeans and sales clerks discussing whether this post should be an instagram post or an instagram story, lining the same streets where dozens of people sat and begged for spare change also made me feel really weird. I will never forget the shame of being followed by a black man after leaving brunch and having him scream at us “this used to be my home. you keep moving here and I can’t afford my home anymore”  and knowing we were actively stoking that justified anger. Gentrification is everywhere but that sort of contrast is something I never wanted to be comfortable with.

At the end of the day, the main reason I’m leaving is because I strayed too far. I expected the whiteness, I expected the rain but i didn’t expect for my heart to ache with so much homesickness. I am one thousand percent confident that I could have made a really full and beautiful life here and there are so many things I wish I had gotten to do (the world naked bike ride being one of them), but being three thousand miles from my family and friends was just too much. I hated being away from my mom on mothers day, my best friend on her birthday, my brother when he turned 21, and all of the small moments that I missed this year. I am finally in a place that I’m able to travel, but I was taking any time and money to go visit Virginia. When we flew back after a trip home for Christmas, I was so unsettled by the feeling of leaving home to go home. In Portland I had all of the physical accoutrements of home- a housekey, my bed, a job, my dog, letters in the mailbox.  In Virginia I had bars full of people I knew and loved, I had my best friend of fifteen years, I had the comfort of my mom’s kitchen, I had my favorite thrift stores my feet firmly planted on the ground and a thousand more emotional indicators of being home.

leaving Portland feels like a breakup.  I’ve had some of the best experiences since being here. It feels premature to leave less than a year after arriving, but I consider that more of a success than feeling like I’m spending exorbitant amounts of time and money on prolonging the inevitable. which is going back to where I feel the most like myself, the most focused and the most grounded. Talking through all of the emotions (joy, fear, anxiety, and doubt mostly) I realized that I’m so so so lucky to have such an overwhelming sense of self in Virginia, such a love for the place I came from and such a decisive personality to prioritize getting back there.

Moriah reached out to model for me in late march and I was admittedly kind of starstruck. She’s a Portland photographer with a portfolio that is dripping with texture, concept and feminine energy and I loved her work from the moment I saw it and I knew it would be a dream to photograph her. We spent a sunny afternoon in her backyard (and greenhouse. a long-held dream come true.) and she was so. damn. confident in front of the camera I was running around and rambling and really trying my damndest to capture it.

that’s one of the most noticeable changes I’ve seen since making the quick, all-in leap from digital to film photography is I have to slow the fuck down. when I can’t shoot 20 frames a minute, I can’t take a picture without checking my settings (hard habit to break), I can’t show my subjects photos to explain the micro-adjustments I want to make to their poses, and I can’t just click the shutter to fill the awkward silence, I have to actually focus on what I’m feeling. Sometimes I get nervous that the slowness of it all makes me look like I don’t actually know what I’m doing (which is more than half true lol), but the slowness is starting to finally feel welcome because my pictures are finally starting to look the way I want them to. It’s worth mentioning that I have Yan Palmer’s teeth kiss workshop to thank for that begrudging gratitude for slowness and recognizing LOTS OF FEELINGS behind the camera (teeth kiss is about to go out of stock forever and if you’re a photographer or visual creative at all it’s worth its weight in gold. please get it here . this is not sponsored).

I want to live in a greenhouse and I REALLY wish I didn’t kill every plant that passed through the doors of my home.

this is my favorite of them all! ^^^^^

so it’s worth mentioning that about ten frames into this shoot, I went to switch rolls and opened a box of film and realized I had purchased 120 instead of 35 mm because I forgot there was even difference when I was ordering stuff on amazon one night. Basically I showed up to this shoot with this wildly talented photographer without fucking film for my camera. luckily, I was able to buy some off of her BUT I inadvertently was thrust into shooting my first roll of black and white. there are some that I definitely wish were in color but I’m still in looooove with the moodiness (and learned my lesson to double check before “buy now with one click”)

birth of Venus vibes!

dappled sunlight is my favorite thing in the world

the inspiration for this shoot sparked when I was wine drunk at a fifth floor bar over the winter. I looked down into the windows of this weird, industrial building and checked my maps app to see what it was. a hardware store. sounded weird but I saw lots of lamps and orbs and shapes and windows and resolved to check it out whenever I was in the area next. I scoped it out one afternoon and found the perfect corner of nothing but white glass objects and windows. everything glowed and I was enamored and knew it would be a dream to photograph.

The thing was, I only had an out of focus photograph of my boyfriend mid-sentence as a way to pitch it as a location. It was admittedly a hard sell, but I’m glad Shatoya was the one to agree to it.

so

many

textures

its like she’s surrounded by freaking clouds. the patches of light on the worn hardwood really get me.

these are my favorite two from the session. capturing light in a way that’s equal parts natural and free but also emotive and intentional is something I’ve been working on for so long and this little square foot under a skylight delivered.

these are some we took on the way over in a random alley. I always wonder if the person who painted these walls intentionally made it so damn beautiful or if its the product of lazy graffiti coverups. either way, it reminds me of Rothko and photographed like an aura. 

this shoot was a really tender reminder of how I fell in love with photography. When I was a senior in high school, I would drive around in my clunky VW van and take my friends to all of these crazy, remote corners of Chesapeake VA and take their senior portraits in abandoned barns, undeveloped fields, and on fallen tree trunks.  They would constantly ask me “how do you even find this stuff” and sometimes I had the locations planned, but more often than not, areas would catch my eye as I drove by them and I would U-turn to see what magic would come of shooting there.

for as long as I’ve been taking portraits in these sorts of places, it was always a dream to take a day-trip with a model and shoot everywhere along the way that inspired me. Shooting with Makiah was that dream actualized, because that’s exactly what we did. we knew we wanted to end at Bagby, and I knew there was going to be spots along the way that I would want to stop by. It was sunny and warm and felt auspicious and vibrant, driving along the river, chatting and stopping at this beautiful little embankment 

after we wrapped up on pretending that it was summer, we kept driving until we got to bagby. Which was covered in snow. This was my first time in months actually getting out of Portland for an afternoon so even though I hate the cold and could happily go the rest of my life without seeing snow, the hike in to the springs was so refreshing. The way the four elements present themselves in the forests of the northwest make for some of the most holistically beautiful sights I can imagine.

that sunlight feeling

and then we got to the springs. I had wanted to shoot here since my first visit to Portland, when a friend had brought me up the mountain at midnight on the summer solstice of 2016 and we bathed nude under the moonlight. it was as poetic as it sounds and was one of the experiences that swayed me to Portland. The light was catching on the steam all around us and it felt like a dreamscape.

The reality of shooting at the springs was frustrating, unglamorous and freaking cold. My lens kept fogging up and the light was scarce. I was flustered but Makiah was a freakin champ and was able to make being freezing and uncomfortable look feminine and dreamy and I’m so grateful she was up for a challenge.

This was my first portrait session shot on film and I’m so so happy with them. All of these were shot on portra 400 with a canon EOS 3 and a canon 50 mm f/1.8.

 

Colors: bright yellow flowers, deep blood orange, bands of sunlight in the kitchen

Textures: silky, flowy anything. the kaleidoscope of textiles at vintage stores, washing my face with coconut oil and a charcoal cleanser, 

Tastes: Italian red wine (Barolo, Sangiovese, anything big and juicy), avocados finally starting to taste ripe, ice water from a glass jar

Sounds: I know there’s gonna be- Jamie XX, Forest Gump- Frank Ocean, All Night Long- Beyonce

Scents: violet candles, perfume and bath bombs, white sage incense, piles of mandarins at whole foods 

Tasks: waiting for film. building/refinishing furniture, paying off debt 

Realizations: my pride shows itself as overcommitment and stubbornness to stick with it even when forfeiting commitments does no harm and actually benefits my life more than anything. I had been dragging my feet on studying for my introductory sommelier course, stressed about the costs of traveling, but was SET on taking the test in May. I cancelled my spot (with intention to reschedule for a later date closer to home) and felt weightless and excited to focus energy elsewhere for the spring and summer.

Rituals: reading my tarot cards in our spare bedroom upstairs. Lighting a stick of incense, pouring a glass of wine and evaluating the energies at work in my life. 

Accomplishments: Adopting a special needs dog and having shit hit the fan. Realizing I’m more compassionate than I thought myself possible. Working my ass off and paying down what feels like mountains of debt.