Got pics?

I'm a visual person.  I love color, texture, shape.  I need to see in order to make sense of my world.  I hear and I forget. . . I see and I understand.   

When I was 15 I picked up my dad's Minolta and took a class.  I started to see the world in a brave new way, through a viewfinder and in black and white.  It changed my life. . . .  Gave me self-esteem.  Gave me something to do with all my waking hours.  Gave me a college major.  Gave me something I was good at. . . .

I let photography go for a while so I could teach school and start my family.  I took a lot of snapshots of the family - but they were good snapshots, mind you. . . .  Every now and then we'd go somewhere and I'd take some "real" photographs, which felt good.

And then, one day, I got a job at a consignment shop.  I started taking pictures here and there to put on the consignment shop's website.  And - all of a sudden - photography came back to me.  Everything I had learned in college about commercial photography was suddenly relevant.  Woo hoo!  What fun, to actually use what I learned in college in a real job. 

I love to take pictures!  I love to take pictures that transform an item into something more that what it is.  I love to take pictures that make the viewer fall in love with what they are looking at. 

Here are a few of my favorite pictures that I've taken over the past few years. . . .  I hope you like them.