Wrong.
It's not easy. Yes, technically anyone who has a camera is a photographer. Yet, people take the job that I do for granted so much. [I know a few fellow photographers who can relate to this.] Photography isn't a point and snap kind of thing if you take it as seriously as I do. You have to know about lighting, ISO, RAW, Aperture, Exposure, F-stop, Shutter Speed, and many other things. You need to know what vibration reduction is and when to use it. What's an external flash? A flash diffuser? A soft box?
It's time consuming. Yes, it looks very quick when I have a camera in my hand and you hear the shutter snap three times in a row very quickly...but what you don't know is I just know what the heck I'm doing. No, I'm not the BEST photographer and I am still learning, but I'm (excuse me) damn good at what I do. I take the time to learn about it; and take care of each and every photograph that passes through the lens of my camera.
Photography isn't just a way to make money or a hobby that I love. It actually means the world to me. Here is where I will begin to tell you why I started photography.
It was April 2008 and I had just gotten my heart shattered by someone I cared about immensely. We had one mutual friend, and I confided in him when I was hurting. He asked me what I loved. I said "taking pictures" He told me to take my passion for photography and all the hurt I was feeling inside and put them together. Two days later, I hopped in the car with my mom and we drove everywhere, and I took random pictures of landscapes with my 8 megapixel, hot pink, Polaroid digital camera.
It wasn't until later that year, after I was married and my husband deployed that I began to realize: I could do this. So I began to watermark my best photos with "Autumn Hill Photography".
My first photoshoot was done with that pink Polaroid (that I still have).
There are three amazing things that came from my marriage. Ireland, Kealan, and Nikon D5000.
Once I got the Nikon, for my 21st birthday in 2009, poor Ireland was my biggest subject.
I promise I have well over two thousand pictures of my daughters. They are definitely my favorite subjects. However, I do love taking pictures for other people. It's like capturing a moment in time. Bottling it up so in ten, twenty, thirty years they can open it up and all of these memories come rushing back. It will bring a smile to their face or a tear to their eye. That's what it's about for me. I love looking at my photographs and remembering the day behind it. It's amazing. It's a lot of technical stuff to do photography; but it's the most amazing thing I could have ever asked God to be able to do with my life.
So, before you say something about everyone can be a photographer; remember it's not the camera that makes the photograph a beautiful one; it's the heart of the person controlling that camera that makes a photograph beautiful.
Some of my favorites:
And my all time favorite:
You know I pay entirely too much attention to your photos when I can recognize just about all of those. I could spend hours looking through your albums, especially of your babies. It's -quite- obvious how much love and dedication goes into your work, not to mention imagination. Yours has always been wonderful. I don't think it would matter where the camera was, you have a knack for looking at a scene and finding the beauty, the diamond in the rough of it all.
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