Girl Hearts Camera Photography

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 ♥’.