Just before Christmas Ideas Tap and Emma Case got together to offer 10 lucky peeps a wedding photography workshop. I literally dropped all my Christmas shopping when I found out I’d got a place… having admired Emma’s approach to wedding photography for a while now, I seriously couldn’t believe my luck!
It felt like this workshop was coming at just the right time. I’ve been so full of self doubt lately… watching my friends plan weddings and buy houses, I’ve started to wonder whether I’m on the right path and whether I really can make a career out of photography. It was sort of a gut feeling that getting the chance to meet someone who’s work I really respected would help me to answer that question… So off to London I trotted…
Erm, yeah, I’m not quite sure what it was specifically about the day… but somehow Emma & Pete managed to make everything I’ve been fretting over make sense. They threw out all the crap swirling around in my head and left me feeling, well… they left me feeling really happy to be honest.
On the train home, my head was swimming with thoughts about the day. I opened my note book scanning the scrambled notes I’d made and amongst it all, a few lines stood out:
“Be brave, honest, authentic…
look backwards…
why do you do what you do…
…Dream Big.”
It usually takes me ages to write what I actually mean to say, but suddenly the words were there. So I grabbed my pen and I wrote…
“It’s all about the journey you take…
No journey is ever the same, and there is no right or wrong path.
Most important of all is that you enjoy it. That it’s right for you…
and only you can know that.
For me, photography is hugely important, because it connects us with our past. When my parents split at 7 my world completely changed. Everything I knew was changed… and sometimes it’s almost as if those first 7 years never happened. The memories become faded and worn. Distorted sometimes. You question what it was all like before…
It’s weird, looking back. The last holiday we took as a family, I’d just been given a Polaroid camera, (that I recently found hiding in an old suitcase)… and I scrap booked the shit out of that holiday; sellotaping sand and shells into my book and taking snaps of random cats and my cousin.
On the last day, as we were leaving the holiday home, packing everything into the cars – it was pouring with rain, but my 7 year old self was determined to get a group photo. And I remember making everyone line up to take this blurry family photo. The last family photo we had.
It’s imperfect in every-way. But it’s something tangible to remind me that that memory is real.
And that’s my why.
I get a hard lump in my throat whenever I think about the sadness and pain of the divorce.
I know perfectly that life, family, people… they change. And moments that were once so real, so vivid, can just stop – and then they’re lost. But photographs help you to hold on to the bits that make you, you.
Your family, your friends, your cat…
Photographs are your legacy.
And finally I’m beginning to trust in myself, in my passion, to tell someone’s story – to help capture their legacy, honestly and authentically.”
So yeah, thanks to Emma for making me croak and cry in a room full of people I’d known a few hours 😛
But most of all thank you for giving your time and yourself, 100%.
Photos from the workshop to follow xx
