My New Love- Photography

I started this blog over 9 years ago. That's a long time in the world of blogs. At the time, my only goal was to showcase our projects. Projects we were doing in our own home and projects people were hiring us to do. My expectations were reasonably low. I just wanted to be able to direct potential clients to our body of work online. And a crazy thing happened along the way. People started "pinning" our projects, sharing our makeovers and "liking" us on social media. And the website started getting some really good traffic. And that got me thinking.

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The Haven Conference

I started thinking about how to improve the content I was creating. I attended the Haven Bloggers Conference this summer for the second time and was able to participate in a very rewarding mentorship program with Katie and Jeremy of Bower Power Blog as our leaders. Those guys are amazing, and real, and authentic. They are good friends with John and Sherry from Young House Love who were also at the conference, so we got the benefit of mentorship discussions with all four of these Home Decor Blogging Rockstars. They had really great advice on writing about your passions, being authentic and telling your story. Their advice led me to write my last two posts about "Why We Paint". It also got me thinking about what I am passionate about. I do love painting, kitchen makeovers and some DIY, AND you will still see that here; but I will also be sharing about my passion for beautiful interior spaces.

Brooks painted three of these paintings on our gallery wall.

How I got started in Photography

My mentors also got me thinking about my blog photos. To really up my blog game, I needed to improve my photos. My iPhone 6 plus is just not going to deliver all the shots I need to tell the kind of stories I want to tell. The first thing I did was take this (affiliate link) Photography e course by Place of My Taste. She taught at the Haven conference and there was a lot of chatter about how great and helpful her class was. I had taken photography classes before, but it never clicked with me. Aniko presented the material in a written e-book, she included photo examples, video tutorials, and creative charts so that it all now makes sense. It just clicked. So, I decided to purchase a used Nikon D60 DSLR camera. Below are some of my first shots.

I love how the background is blown out in this photo.

I love the way the light falls on this chair.

I love the pattern on pattern of this vignette.

The Nikon D60 captures the depth and movement in the wall that I never could do with my iPhone.

I'm having so much fun playing with aperture, shutter speed and ISO. I even bought a tripod and a light kit. My goal is better photos- magazine quality photos and a more broad range of blog topics. I'm anxiously awaiting this Lightroom e course by Beth at Unskinny Boppy.  To see my latest photos, make sure you are following me on Instagam by clicking the photo below.

And even though my passion is interior photography, I couldn't resist snapping some shots of this kid.