I was talking to a former student the other day who has become both a friend and occasional assistant on photo-related projects. She was commenting on the photos of my daughter I posted to my personal Facebook page. I told her that I am struggling to find a balance between business and personal as it relates to KarenLeslie Photography. The challenge is my business is me. How much of me to share without crossing some personal boundaries is the grey area that I find challenging from time-to-time. My daughter is 3 and has been a subject in front of my camera from the beginning. For the most part, she is a willing subject and I think that is a result of the fact that I haven’t overwhelmed her with taking pictures. In fact, once she was able to sit up on her own, I started to do two things: my iPhone became my every-day go to camera and I would schedule mini photo sessions with her once a month. My iPhone is unobtrusive so many times she doesn’t even know I’m taking photos. And, doing something more “elaborate” once a month seemed to fit my need for photos and her patience level.
As you can imagine, after 3 years, I have a large number of images. Not all of the photos have been edited, printed or even shared. I’m happy that I have them, and its a fun surprise to go back into the folders after some time and find new gems. I was doing that this afternoon and stumbled on many new favorites, which I thought I’d share with you. I’ll continue to do that from time to time because I know its important for my clients to know me as someone other than the person behind the camera.
All of these were taken last year. Some are almost a year old at this point. But, I still love them.
