Tammy Smith is another photographer whose work was featured on Paper & Camera products. We fell in love with her playful and whimsical style. Her newborn work is simply breathtaking.
I’d love to introduce you to Tammy and her lovely work ♥
1. I love hearing stories about how someone’s journey began. Tell us about your journey, how your passion for photography began and how your business started.
I think the most wonderful thing about this business is that there is room for everyone and our stories, our experiences, shape who we are as artists.
Pictures were always important to my family growing up. My grandmother gave me a photo album of my life when I turned 16. It’s a beautiful history of me as a child. I can remember always having cameras around as I grew. They were never off limits. When I was 16 I traveled to East Asia and my father let me take his 35mm SLR. That was my first exposure to the magic relationship between ISO, Shutter Speed, and Aperture. I don’t think I really knew what I was doing but I had a great time and brought back enough images to bore my friends and family to tears. Ha, ha
Fast forward, twenty-plus years. I was a midwife on call 24/7 and it was destroying me. As a mother to ten children I wanted needed more control of my life. My sister had started a photography business a couple of years before and was having lots of fun and making money. She offered to loan me her backup camera and show me the ropes.
Suddenly I was a photographer. Yes, I was one of those moms everyone talks about. I started selling $50 CD’s. (so glad I’ve moved past that) But I knew that I needed more education and set out to find it. I purchased books, read blogs, and questioned my sister endlessly. I purchased a D7000, a 50/1.8, a 28-75/2.8, and a 70-200/2.8, enrolled in four workshops over a year’s time and never looked back!
It’s been wonderful to discover a medium that offers me a way to paint with light. I started photography as a means to an end, and I’ve fallen in love with it on the journey. I love catching a child’s personality, freezing a moment in time for their family to treasure forever, and filling my clients walls with beautiful memories.
2. Being in business is hard, but rewarding. What is the one piece of advice you would give to someone just getting their feet wet?
Get more education – from lots of sources. Challenge yourself to try new things, reach outside of your genre and style. I believe it keeps your work fresh and feeds your creative soul. When we first get started we know we like doing “THIS”. Finding your voice takes time and experimentation. There are soooo many wonderful ways to use photography to bring in an income and reaching out and trying new things will help you find what works for you.
3. Tell us about your most favorite session ever to date.
Oh my goodness, this is a hard one! Often that’s my latest session. Hmmm… I’d have to say it was a session I did in conjunction with a workshop I was assisting at last October in Florida. In Alaska we don’t have a golden hour very often. Because the sun is low on the horizon all winter and never sets in the summer we only have it for a month in the spring (while the ground is still covered in snow) and fall. Shooting with this beautiful light every day was a dream come true!
This location was gorgeous but full of tall grass. I’d been warned about snakes, alligators, and icky bugs and was scared to death to venture off the beaten path. But when push came to shove, the photographer in me waded into the grass, tromped it down and made lots of noise to scare anything hiding away so we could get the pictures we were dreaming of.
4. If you could only shoot with one camera body and one lens for the rest of your career, which ones would you use?
I recently upgraded to the D600 and added the 85/1.8 to my collection of lenses. I’m kind of a lens junky. I’ve got my eye on the 50/1.4 right now. I think that I’d have to stick with my D600 and the 50mm. I’ve found prime lenses to be my favorites and that combination would allow me to do most everything.
5. Your lovely work was featured on products for Paper & Camera. (yay!). What is your favorite product that your work is displayed on?
I adore gallery wraps! I use CG Pro Prints for my clients work and the images in my home. They are affordable, allowing me to pass that saving on to my clients – hence they buy more of them. Also the quality is amazing! I LOVE the finished back they include. I’d say the 20×60 is by far my favorite size to sell – it really makes a statement.
Tammy’s photos are featured on some of Paper & Camera’s best selling photo overlays.
 
Marisa Taylor is one of the many talented photographers whose work is featured in Paper & Camera products. As a lover of the matte style, I instantly felt drawn to her beautiful work.
I’m so excited to introduce y’all to Marisa and her soulful photography.
I love hearing stories about how someone’s journey began. Tell us about your journey, how your passion for photography began and how your business started.
I have been in business by myself this past March for four years. And it has not been an easy journey! First, let me say that photography was not “supposed” to be my ultimate goal. I was born and raised in NYC, and the plan was to finish college, get a loft with my best friends, and be major business women. I ended up moving to Delaware when I was 18, and that totally changed my outlook on life. At first, photography started as a hobby, it was fun, it let me be creative. Before I officially went into business, I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, and that knocked the wind out of my sales. My husband, seeing how happy photography made me, encouraged me to keep going. And even undergoing a lot of medical tests and days when I couldn’t get out of bed, Marisa Taylor Photography was born. I started with weddings, but after having my own miracle baby, Charlotte, my focus changed yet again. And now I photograph babies and families. I specialize in capturing love and the growing family!
Being in business is hard, but rewarding. What is the one piece of advice you would give to someone just getting their feet wet?
If I would have been told to shoot for me and my clients, and not focus on other photographers and why I am not successful, it would have saved me a lot of heart ache. Thats the one thing that I would tell any new photographer, don’t worry about others. Work on making your business work for you! Work on creating amazing images for your clients! If you spend your time trying to imitate, you will drive yourself mad! Once you stop trying to seek the approval of other photographers and aim to seek the approval of your clients and focus on photographing what you love, you will feel a change within yourself and your business.
Tell us about your most favorite session ever to date.
It’s really hard to pick one favorite session. I love them all, they are like my babies! But there is one that essentially signified the shift in my business, and the growth to where it is at today. When switching from weddings to portraits, I wanted to break into birth photography also. So I put a call out in our local birth center group, and Beth was one of the mothers that answered. We met for coffee and had our daughters with us, and from that, a friendship grew. With the birth session, she went ahead and booked a maternity and newborn session also. And that was my breakout into focusing on lifestyle photography. Her maternity session was the first time that I felt like I was shooting like “me” and no one else.
If you could only shoot with one camera body and one lens for the rest of your career, which ones would you use?
I originally started with the Canon rebel xti, then moved on the Canon 50D for about three years. When I got my Canon Mk II, I almost cried. When I tested out the Canon Mk III, I DID cry! But I will stick with my MKII, it does everything that I need. As far as lenses go, my favorite go to lens now, and probably forever, will be the 35 F1.4L.
Your lovely work was featured on products for Paper & Camera. (yay!). What is your favorite product that your work is displayed on?
I could just stare at Marisa’s lovely work all day long ♥
Photography by Lorna
Facebook: Photography by Lorna
This is a session inspired by my sons love for Peter Pan. We dressed him in his outfit and took a walk with his brothers, his very own lost boys. The session was fun because they were allowed to really use their imagination and play-act. I told them that they were very happy with themselves, they had rescued Tinkerbell. They were also guarding her and protecting her from Hook! They ate it up. My own children are the hardest for me to photograph and I really learned a lot working with the three of them on this. I have no novelty factor at all so I am not their photographer. I have always enjoyed photographing other peoples children more than my own. This session changed things for me because I treated the session completely differently and now all my sessions are more like this.
Equipment used: Nikon D300, 50mm1.4g and a light reflector
photo credit photography by lorna
In the fall of 2012, the idea of Paper & Camera started forming between me & my best friend, Nicole. Our love for designing & creating, combined with our friendship, stirred a desire to do something meaningful together. I was pretty hesitant to do anything that involved a partnership, it just never ends well & Nicole means the world to me, so we evolved our idea to move past a partnership and instead focused on sharing a platform to share our designs individually.
Sadly, our idea was put on hold for several weeks after my mother passed away. I just did not have the motivation to walk that journey quite yet, and there were times I never thought I would regain that motivation. (I feel the need to share with y’all that while I am doing a little bit better, it’s still hard. I feel like sometimes my world is closing in on me, and dates are really hard for me. The 29th of every month gets me. But it’s just one day at a time, and I do the best that I can.).
In the beginning of the year, I started taking so much comfort in designing. And y’all were so supportive & encouraging. Y’all made me want to keep doing it more and more, and with each new order, each praise, each compliment, I started accepting that designing was a version of my therapy. Something that I could focus on without needing to think about anything else. I would get lost in each new design or illustration. It was glorious. It was soothing.
So I shared my designs more and more, and then one day, I took a hard look at GHC and it dawned on me that I had become more about selling and less about encouraging. Even though I didn’t have it in me to be encouraging or inspiring, I knew that I also did not want GHC to become known as a site that only sells products. The ability to share of myself & encouragement would come back, it has already begun to come back a little bit, and in the meantime, I wanted to retain the integrity of GHC. I’ve brought on a very talented blog manager, and I can not wait until she starts, because there will be new life infused into GHC and y’all will benefit. It will be everything I envisioned for GHC in the beginning of 2012.
But I still needed a place to sell my designs, because creating them has become an incredibly important part of who I am. Designing has brought me more happiness than I ever imagined, even after all of these years, it’s like a whole new perspective and the fact that y’all love my designs so much is just the icing on the cake.
And so we started talking about Paper & Camera and what it could become, what it would mean for both of us. The truth is, there are bigger, long term plans for Paper & Camera, but for now, it’s pretty simple. Two friends sharing a platform to showcase our designs to the photography community.
The name for Paper & Camera sort of fell into place. I was thinking about the niche we were serving and what a common thread could be. The common thread is that we are all artists. We all create our art with a variety of mediums, such as paper & cameras, but the one thing we all have in common is that we are artists. And, we were 2 friends, each with our own separate businesses, Girl Hearts Camera and Jubilee Paperie, which made Paper & Camera even more special & meaningful.
We had many late nights, many sleepless nights, many lunch dates, many phone calls, a ton of support from our family…and finally, FINALLY, we were ready to announce to the world that Paper & Camera was born.
Thank you for being such an amazing community that has always had my back. That has been there for me, and has shown so much kindness and compassion to me. especially over the last few months.
And thank you for supporting my new venture, a little place on the web where I can share my newest designs and ideas with y’all while keeping Girl Hearts Camera what it was always meant to be.
As we say hello over at Paper & Camera, and get to know you better, we hope you will take advantage of the special ‘Purchase the whole shop for Only $95 special‘. It’s just our little way of saying ‘it’s so lovely to meet you, we’re going to be great friends ♥’.
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by Heather Manor
Beautiful work Tammy!
Thank you so much for the feature Heather!