01 — Photography 101

I honestly don’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in a taking photos. When I was 12, I begged my mom to buy me a bright turquoise CoolPix point & shoot at Costco for my birthday. I’d bring it with me to any place my parents would take me from family vacations to fishing trips near my small home town.

In high school, I enrolled in film photography which became a new obsession, spending my lunch hours alone in the dark room, developing photo after photo. Then I took digital photography and set up my own studio in the basement of the Art Building using duct tape and a wrinkled sheet I’d stolen from home, and I’d grab any students I could find skipping class to take their portrait. My weekends were spent with creative friends either staging our own photoshoots in our backyards or making and editing home videos.

My Junior year of high school, I signed to a modeling agency in San Francisco, and my life became a whirlwind of editorial photoshoots and high fashion runway shows. I absolutely loved it, essentially getting paid to play dress-up and act out different characters, finding my own unique way to translate the photographer’s vision for each shoot. I gained so much confidence from my modeling years - the fake it ‘til you make it mentality works, I swear - and working with so many talented professionals in the industry, learned a ton about fashion and in studio photography too. I became increasingly comfortable in front of the camera, learning how to take direction, which in turn, helped me know how to give direction to my own photo subjects down the road.

02 — Hello, San Francisco

After college, I landed a position at a boutique PR agency which meant I packed my bags and officially moved to San Francisco. I knew absolutely no one in the city, so I started showing up at organized photo meet-ups on the weekends to meet people, which also re-ignited my love of photography again. Those people I met became good friends, and I started going on photo adventures with them outside the city almost every weekend: Yosemite, Big Sur, the Redwoods, the list goes on.

At work, I became increasingly interested in influencer marketing, eventually pitching my agency to let me run all influencer campaigns for LEGO North America. To my surprise, they agreed. My first industry experiences were sending LEGO sets to mommy bloggers and coordinating all-access events for the top child toy YouTubers. Eventually, I moved over to one of the largest PR firms in the world for greater influencer marketing opporunities, working on large scale influencer campaigns for Fortune 500 companies including eBay and Starbucks.

Meanwhile, my photography hobby was slowly turning into its own side hustle, and I was starting to gain a following on Instagram and taking on small paid partnerships with brands. The photo adventures I went on were getting bigger and bigger - New Zealand, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, hopping on planes every weekend to go shoot National Parks - and as a result, I was always sitting at negative vacation days. I was being torn in two different career paths, and ultimately, I took a leap of faith, quit my job, broke my lease, sold all of my belongings, and hit the road to see the world and attempt to make a creative career out of it.

03 — Wanderlust Status: Activated

In just a year and a half, I visited 23 countries across Europe and Asia, and road tripped across almost every corner of the United States too. I befriended reindeer in the Arctic Circle, got followed by the police in China, crashed the Finnish Grammy’s, attempted cliff jumping in the Philippines, camped with desert nomads in Jordan, summited active volcanoes in Indonesia, lived out of a camper van in New Zealand, danced through the streets of Istanbul…the list goes on and on. I was living a life full of wild adventures I could never even have imagined, and I will never stop feeling grateful for these experiences. They changed me as a person entirely, and for the better.

At the same time, my Instagram following took off from posting photos from my travels while on the road, and I started landing my dream clients too, working with airlines, tourism boards, car companies, and outdoor clothing brands. It took countless sleepless nights and a whole lot of hustle and grit, but I went from being a dirt bag traveler to eventually surpassing my PR agency income. It truly felt like I had made it.

And then a pandemic hit. And my life - along with every single person in the entire world - came to a screeching halt.

04 — The Next Chapter

A travel photographer stuck in lockdown during a worldwide travel ban sounds like a bad oxymoron. As the days, weeks, and months went by, I finally had to face the question…what now?

It’s a question I’m still answering to be honest, but what I do know is all this time spent at home gave me a chance to catch my breath and connect the dots of this story. That all of these life experiences - photography, modeling, influencer marketing, traveling - all feed into the fulfilling career path I have in front of me now, and they’ve allowed me to expand my business in ways I had never thought of before.

I launched an online business course to teach creatives how to achieve their own dream freelance careers. Alongside my cohost, I started a podcast in an attempt to bring back transparency, vulnerability and authenticity in the influencer world. I learned that adventures exploring my own Washington backyard and car camping out of my vintage Land Cruiser could be just as grand as those on the other side of the world. And I pushed my creative boundaries to incorporate more of my fashion and editorial roots back into my work again, encouraging my audience to embrace their own unbridled creativity along the way.

Now what’s the next adventure? I can’t wait to find out.