Thank you so much to everyone who answered the casting call! I will be in touch soon! xo

Boy do I miss the beach. I could really go for some nice, hot sunny weather right now!

More often than not I get emails and messages from women telling me about their insecurities with themselves or their bodies, hindering them from scheduling a shoot. And I get upset. Not because they don’t book with me (although after talking more and bonding over email/phone, they typically do), but because of the things they say and how I can feel their emotion coming out in these emails and it makes me sad that they feel these ways about themselves.

In today’s society, women often are led to believe that they must look, talk, walk, and act certain ways that society members deem appropriate and acceptable. Anything outside of this is seen as unacceptable or different. This is what beats us down. The magazines show very thin, often times photoshopped, women that the world says are beautiful and real women. We start to feel like if we don’t look that way, then we aren’t beautiful.  If we don’t have the long luscious locks, bright red lips, plump and rosy cheeks, long slender legs, tiny torso, or tanned skin then we don’t feel like society accepts us as beautiful women. We need to realize that no matter what the magazines or tv ads say, WE ARE BEAUTIFUL. YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL. Repeat that over and over in your head. Say it out loud. Shout it to the world.

I’ll admit that I have insecurities with my body and doubts about myself as well. As a photographer, I tell my clients to open up and be comfortable in front of my camera. I’m a very easy going person, so I like to believe that it’s easy for them to do around me. But I can still see it in some of their faces during the start of their shoot. The doubt. The concern. The vulnerability. I try my hardest to get my clients to see who they are and to rock what they have. There is no better time than now to embrace ourselves. We can dwell on the past and we can dwell on the future and losing those last pesky 15 pounds.. or we can learn to love what we have, show it off, and embrace it like hell. Every time you doubt yourself or say you hate something about your body, I want you to stop and think of something that you love about yourself and your body. Everything from the dimple on your cheek to the length of your legs. Negativity gets us nowhere, but positivity does.

You are beautiful.

Repeat this. Over and over again.

And because I’m behind the lens 99.9% of the time because I often feel down about myself and don’t like to have my photo taken, I’m posting these images of me stepping out of my comfort zone and rocking what I have.

These last two are actually iPhone snaps that my husband took for me. Hence why my lens cap is still on, ha! But they really tell who I am and what I’m passionate about.

So you want all of the photos from your session. Your photographer advertises that you’ll see 30, maybe 40, finished images but you know darn well that she pressed that little button on her camera around 500 times. So what gives? You ask her for a disc of all of your images and she says… NO! You’re furious. You feel jipped. She surely took a few hundred of me, you say to yourself. Why do I only get to see a few of them?

Because we don’t want your final gallery to include unflattering images of you such as this:

No offense to Beyonce, she’s a gorgeous woman but this image was captured at an unflattering moment.

We as photographers not only take photos, but we edit and process them. Part of our job is to ensure that you only see the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the immaculate, the absolute perfect images. Sure, we may have pressed the shutter button a lot, but that doesn’t mean all of those photos turned out. We have to account for changes in settings, weird facial expressions, blinking, unflattering poses, motion blur, and everything in between. Sometimes we’re trying to shoot a movement series and we need to nail focus on time.. we might fire off 20 shots to get 1 that is perfect. Every photographer is different.

What do I want you to take from this little blip of a blog post? Trust your photographer! Trust their judgement! It’s their job. Unless of course, you want to have images like the above in your finished album. :)

You’ll want images that are awesome and fierce like so:

I’m sharing a few today since I already blogged a post this week. I just can’t contain myself. I’ve had these images for a while, just finally got around to editing the full set and blogging. Stunning lady!