I truly believe that it is never too late to start a brand new chapter of your life. I’m turning thirty later this year and I have huge ambitions of the future. I honestly feel like I’m just getting started! Maybe it’s taken me until now to really figure out what I want to do, how I want to live my life and who I really am. That might sound a little bit lame but bare with me okay…
I guess what I mean is that I have a very clear idea now of what I want both personally and professionally, and I’m ready to work mega hard for it.
So work wise, I would say I’ve had two careers and endless side hustle jobs.
Job number one ; Dancer. When I was nineteen, I graduated from dance college and I was a professional dancer for three years. Before getting a dance job in a musical, I worked in a restaurant, a clothes shop, and I also did a few commercial modelling gigs too. Whilst working in the theatre I discovered my passion for photography. (This was about four years prior to the birth of instagram.) I invested in a fancy camera and two lenses and some studio lights. I used to photograph my friends, dancers from the show, my niece and nephews and sometimes I’d take candid snaps of strangers too. I remember photographing my friend Lucy at my house one day, Rob came home to find that I had transformed our living room into a ‘studio’. The sofa was in the hallway and I’d tapped paper over the windows to block out the light. I’m very grateful that he has always been incredibly laid-back as well as very supportive of my creative adventures. I set up a photography website and it become a side job that I really loved. I suppose I never really stopped taking photographs but nowadays, I mostly take photos of Jude and photos for my blog. (selfies don’t count!)
Even though I’d never call myself a photographer, I know that those years snapping my mates really taught me a lot. I used to read books about cameras, I’d watch YouTube videos about shutter speed, aperture, photo composition and editing. I discovered a love for curating beautiful images, capturing a persons vibe and story telling. Now of course, I have this blog to share my ideas, and as well as creating images for my own social media, I also create images for brands too. So I guess it was all good practice.