15.10.08

Everyone Starts Somewhere

Surprisingly, I get a lot of resumes, messages and emails about my work. I say it's surprising because... well because I haven't been at this very long and lets face it I'm not Jessica Claire!

I look back at my work from when I started (almost two years ago!!! wow where does the time go?!?) Only by God's grace have I come this far in my business, honestly! I had NO clue what I was doing when I started and have come a long way... I learned A LOT in a span of 6 months because I had to... My job was stressing me out so much that my Doctor was telling me to find a new one, I had started the business but had NO plans of doing anything further than, ready for this, real estate photography! That's where I wanted to start the 360 home views, taking photos for Watson or something like that. I had flyers and things of that nature, I wanted to do people one day but never dreamed that with in a few months I'd have my first WEDDING! It seems like a whirlwind now...

I wanted to take you all on a visual journey of my two years in business.... from my very first "people" photo shoot and up to a recent photo shoot with my most faithful client...

OK, here is a photo from my first ever photo shoot. My friend Caressa, we worked together at BGC and she agreed to bring her cute little girl out for me to experiment...

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This photo was taken in December 06 or Jan 07 I don't honestly remember... I didn't know anything about photoshop but I put my little name in the corner cause I did know people needed to know who took this photo...

I look at it now and see that it's blue, my white balance is off, and the composition of the photo needs a bit of help... it's straight on (mom would be proud she hates my crooked photos) it's a cute photo but you can tell that I had not developed any style of my own!

Now I've decided that the best sample of my work is my client that has been there with me through everything... even when my photos were always blue! LOL

Miss Priscilla... we have had 8 shoots total if you count her band shoots and boy oh boy how much I've learned!!! I want you to look at the following collage and see the progression from one year ago... she seems to like to do photos in August (close to her birthday) and Feb (close to v-day) So take a look at this!!!!!

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Wild huh! As you can see when I started things were much much different!!!! check out the difference from Feb07 to Feb08 and then from Aug07 to Aug08!!!!

So to all you photog's out there that are just starting out... I by far am not done learning nor do I feel I'm at the peek of my career, I just wanted to show you all that you learn so much with every shoot don't get discouraged because your images don't look like some rockstar photographer out there, keep working and always be true to yourself and it'll all fall together how it's supposed to!

5 Comments:

Anonymous said...

wow. you are a great encourager!
how did you start learning more?
did you take classes?

Jess Cumbie said...

A - No... I've never taken a class... I started trying everything I could think of, paid attention to the time of day other people did their photos, read a lot of forums!!! asked questions and I guess just worked through it on my own which honestly is the best way. I have a lot of friends that are photography majors at UNF and they have an artistic style no doubt but it's A LOT different, I think it depends on the person and how they learn. Some people learn by being shown, others by reading, I learn by doing and making mistakes and learning how to fix them :)

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing girly...
I know I needed that!

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing...very inspiring to those of us that are just getting started. I can't wait to see my pictures a year from now- hopefully I will have come a long way.

Anonymous said...

Great progression! Your composition and style is very nice.
And OMG i love Jessica Claire!

I was just going through my archive and looked at when I was a serious amateur (not quiet ready to portfolio build) and I was making myself laugh so hard...:)