me & photography

Before i go any further i want to right my disclaimer ... I love photography. & when i say love i mean in the sense that it's part of who i am, it helps me to feel & understand, it lets me see things i would never notice & experience the world in a way i wouldn't otherwise.

One of the girls in my forum, Tali,  wrote her story about her & her relationship to photography , & got me thinking that maybe by writing down mine i could figure out where i go from here.

I was the average kid in school, loving sports & art more than anything but skating through as a B-grade student. I was never in trouble but i never stood out. But i did have all these kinds of dreams & headed off to 6Th form with the idea of working with horses. Well in picking my subjects i wanted to study photography but with horses in mind it was recommended i try something else & ended up with history, biology & psychology. Well pretty early on it became apparent me & biology weren't going to work out together, so at the end of my first year i took up art & photography. 

Photography was the one class i loved, it (& my awesome tutor) helped me to grow (as cliched as it sounds) & there began my love of all things photographic. Here i started to find the detail in things, to get a new perspective on those random objects, & living in Cambridge i started to admire architecture. I was also lucky enough to have a 50mm 1.4 as my first lens on my beloved Olympus OM-1, which is where my signature small focal point comes from.

But the journey was never easy or straight forward or any of the above, & at the end of my a-levels taking photos all but stopped & i disappeared off to do whatever it is you do when you're trying to find your way in the world. & then i ended up living in Cornwall doing an HND in outdoor education. It was here on my summer off, traveling round the states that me & my little point & shoot rediscovered my love for photography. I decided i wanted to go to University & study photography.

So here i up & moved half way across the country (it's England so really it's not that far) to start all over where again i was privileged enough to have some awesome teachers. In the beginning i just wanted to photograph people, not regular portraits but the kind that capture something in the people your photographing. & then it was sports, with a press pass to the British Superbikes. This it seemed was what i wanted to do. & then it was back to people, editorial style stuff, the things you would see in Time, or Life. I wanted to work for newspapers, my images appearing in weekend supplements around the world. But again at the end of my degree, with my return back to my hometown i became lost again. & i would spend hours in a dark room, printing up my images. There's something about watching your picture appear on paper as if like magic, & going through reams of the stuff as you try to get it perfect.

I spent the summer temping for a pharmaceutical research company & discovered if nothing else, the office life was not for me, & at the end of the summer got a job working in a secondary school as a photography technician & teaching assistant. This has to be the hardest, most challenging job I've ever had, & sometimes the most rewarding. I got to share my love with children who were just discovering it for the first time. There was no pressure on me to perform, just a chance to fall in love again. & gradually i started taking photos for me, no one else just myself. 

But ... yes there's always a but ... i fell in love with the most incredible man (don't tell him that his heads big enough all ready) & went & married into the military. Moving to Germany 2 months after our wedding day, & all of a sudden i went from being Laura to "Mrs Evans" or "SGT Evans wife" & again i forgot what it was i loved before. I was starting over, finding myself again & for the first time since i was 16 unemployed. There's only so much sitting around the house a girl can do before she goes nuts. So i needed a job, but the ones i wanted weren't out there. Jobs for spouses on base are limited & frustrating, & there i ended up as a waitress & now bartender at Chilis. The one upside being the tips, allowed me to invest in my Nikon D300, paid for by myself (seriously i was all kinds of proud about that) & my Macbook & now I'm starting over.

I'm back to photographing the little stuff, the random & unique things i see on my travels, & selling my work. I know that this is what i want to do, it's who i am & just as important it will allow me to have a career as a military wife. But how do i go about this? I have my Etsy shop & my friends are helping me to spread the word, & I'm also looking into doing some portrait work but this whole thing is scary & frustrating & i feel like i don't know where I'm going. But I'm going to give it a try, so i can't look back & wonder "what if", so i can be the person I'm meant to be.

So the question i guess i left answering is where do i go from here ... in the words of Blue Peter ... "answers on a postcard please"!!