I hope everyone is having an amazing holiday season so far! I am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and finishing up all of our weddings and sessions from 2012. It has been a long, exhausting but yet rewarding and amazing year. I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk a little about some of the things that have occured this year, a little reflection on the past year I guess you could say. I will be doing another 2012 wrap up post later with a ton of photos, some that I’ve never got the chance to post, as well as a follow up to my 2012 goals list. I’ll let you guys know what things I actually accomplished from this list, as well as the ones that I didn’t even get a chance to touch. Then of course, my 2013 goals as well! Would love to hear some of your personal goals, and truly believe that it makes a huge difference to actually put them down on paper, so get those lists ready!

First, let’s start from the beginning to give you a little background for those of you that may not be familiar with me. I realized recently that when I took our old website down (I felt like the work on there was so old, it didn’t reflect who I was as a photographer anymore), that I no longer had an about page. I just recently added the short little bio to the side bar on the right to help out with that. I’ve been saying all year that we are going to have a new website up and it bums me out so bad to think about how I haven’t been able to make that happen. Now that i am finally getting caught up with all of my work, I promise that it will be up soon (with an awesome about section!) Anyways, back on track here. I’m going to give you the condensed version of my photography background. I studied photography years ago, but being young and insecure I never pursued it after finishing school. I bartended for a few years and then went back to school for cosmotology, and worked as a hairstylist for a few years. During hair school and my early embarkment into my career as a stylist, I started really getting back into photography. I shot anyone and everyone i could and started actually getting hired to shoot for people. I then started shooting weddings with Dolce Vita Photography. To be completely honest, I was apprehensive about shooting weddings. I just didn’t think it was for me. Kristie from Dolce Vita persuaded me to give it a try and I seriously fell in love. Which, by the way, I still work for her sometimes as a lead photographer and others as a second photographer. As well as second shooting for a few other photographers in the cincy area. I owe so much to Kristie for pushing me to at least give weddings a try, love that girl to pieces. After a year or so second shooting I felt like I was finally confident enough to start booking some of my own weddings. My boyfriend, Josh, had recently started to get into photography as well (he took a few classes back in his DAAP days), so it of course made perfect sense for us to work together and he became my second shooter. We shot our first wedding together at the end of 2010. It was our only wedding of 2010, and we then started booking for 2011. Throughout 2011, I worked full time at the salon and part-time doing photography. It was a loooooot of work. I think there was a point in that year that I counted working almost 90 days straight doing one job or the other without having a single day completely off. I knew something had to give if I wanted to keep my sanity and knew that I had to decide to put my heart into one thing or another. I left the salon at the end of Oct. 2011.

This brings us to 2012. Now why the need to tell you all of that background info? Well, although my business was started prior to this past year, this was the first year that I’ve been a full time photographer. This was the first time I truly felt like I could even say that out loud, that I am a photographer. I usually just said things like, “I shoot photos here and there” etc. I realized that in order to make it, I needed to work on that confidence thing and put myself out there. I knew this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and I was the only one stopping myself from making that happen. So although I’ve technically had a few years experience, I feel like 2012 was my real true start because I was finally able to put everything into my business this year and all of my time and energy has been invested into my photography. It’s been an amazing year for me. It’s also been a huuuuge learning process. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’ve learned this year. I’ve made a tooon of mistakes, and a tooon of progress. I feel like I’ve finally found my style and the types of photography that I truly love doing and want to continue to pursue.

On a personal note, as some of you may know, my mom has faced some serious medical issues this year. I’ve posted a little about it before. She had a heart attack early in the summer, then later on ended up having open heart surgery. Due to some complications from her surgery, made another trip back to the hospital. Then just recently she went into the hospital again with pneumonia, and once again with an infection. Dealing with all of this has been a long, heartbreaking, and stressful journey. She finally came home just a few days before Christmas from her last hospital stay. I’m hoping that this was her last and that her road to recovery is finally now on the right path. It felt like everytime I took a step forward and got caught up on my work, something would happen with her and I would take two steps back.

This is where the apologie comes in. I know that I haven’t delivered 100% this year like I had hoped to. Being relatively new to owning my own business, there are alot of things this year that took me longer to learn than expected. I’ve made mistakes along the way. (I hope to do a follow up post with some things I’ve learned that will hopefully help others).  I’ve had quite a few clients this year receive things late due to mishaps on the technological side of things on my part or because I was dealing with my mom’s illness. So I want to apologize to anyone that may have felt neglected in any way as a client this year. I’ve apologized to everyone personally of course, but want to make sure that I own up to my mistakes and say it again to make sure everyone knows how sorry I am.

I also want to thank all of you so, so, so much for being so unbelievably understanding and patient with me. I can’t begin to express my gratitude for the kind words I’ve received from some of you and how much it has helped that you’ve gave me the okay to deal with the things I needed to and the trust to know that I was working hard to get everything out as soon as I could. The last thing I would have ever wanted to do was half-ass something, just to meet a deadline. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for being amazing clients and friends.

Lastly, the promise. I am promising here and now that I will be on top of my game in 2013. I’ve been working extremely hard at learning new things to help streamline my post processing and get things turned around quicker. I also promise that I won’t let things in my personal life affect my work as much as I did this year. 2013 is going to be an amazing year.  We are so excited about the amazing clients we have booked already, we honestly can’t wait to work with all of them!

Here’s to a happy new year!