I think I’ve always been a photographer, long before I ever picked up a camera with the intention of becoming one.

I’ve always been observant. I notice the little things—the way light falls across a room, the expression someone makes when they think no one is watching, the feeling of a place, or the quiet moment that everyone else seems to walk right past. I’ve always felt things deeply, too, and I think those two qualities have shaped the way I see the world.

I’ve always loved old photographs. I’ll often find myself scrolling through them just to revisit a memory—not because the photograph itself is particularly perfect, but because of everything it brings back. A photograph can take you somewhere you haven’t been in years and, for a moment, make you feel exactly how you felt when you were there.

That became especially meaningful to me after losing my mom. I wasn’t left with many things, but the photographs I do have mean more to me than I could ever really put into words. Growing up, even through seasons of instability and hardship, photographs were a constant. They were small pieces of life that could be held onto. Looking back now, I realize just how much that shaped the way I value photographs—not simply as images, but as pieces of memories.

I’ve always been the person with a ridiculous number of photos on my phone. At one point, I had more than 30,000. I’m the one who will slow down while everyone else keeps walking, stay behind the crowd, or wait a little longer because I see something worth capturing.

My husband has always teased me about my ability to find joy in the most mundane things—to notice something ordinary and somehow make it feel special. Last fall, it finally clicked for me... this is what I do best.

Photography became the place where all of these pieces of me made sense.

I majored in psychology and have always been fascinated by the human mind and experience. Friends, new and old, would likely agree. People fascinate me! I’m endlessly curious about what makes us feel, connect, remember, love, and see the world the way we do. I’m also deeply affected by the environments I’m in—the atmosphere of a place, the energy of a room, and the little details that can completely change how a moment feels. Don’t you dare turn on the overhead lights or try to convince me that Christmas lights should be anything other than warm & incandescent! I make an exception for a select few multicolored lights…but they must also be incandescent.

Even the things I gravitate toward in my everyday life seem to feed the way I photograph. I can spend hours listening to interviews about other people’s lives, watching travel stories from around the world, or getting completely invested in love stories between people I’ve never met. I think I’m always trying to understand people and the worlds they inhabit.

And that’s ultimately what I want to bring to my photography.

I don’t want to simply document what you looked like that day. I want to notice YOU—the way you interact with the people you love, the little things that make your family yours, the atmosphere surrounding you, and the moments that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Because years from now, I don’t think we’ll care whether everything was perfectly posed or whether every detail was flawless. I think we’ll care about how it felt to be there—to love those people, to laugh that hard, to stand in that place, to be in that season of our lives.

That is the kind of story I want to preserve.