An Introduction
The part where I explain this...
Writing a first blog post always feels so weird. Will anyone ever actually see this? Will I actually keep up with posting, or will digital tumbleweed litter the stark landscape? I guess I'll find out.
My name is Lynn and over the course of my life, I've had countless interests and hobbies. Many of which cause me to fall into a deep rabbit hole of obsession that lasts days, weeks, or even months, until the one day I abruptly forget the very existence of said thing and abandon it, maybe forever. Most likely it's undiagnosed ADHD. However the one fixture of my life that's been somewhat constant in the last twenty-odd plus years is photography. I remember being a young teen and nosily snooping thru my mom's closet and finding a leather bag tucked away with an absolute pristine looking Canon FTb inside. I was instantly drawn to it. It was just a beautiful looking camera and though I knew nothing about photography, the possibility it represented intrigued me. I couldn't stop thinking about it.
Of course, initially after asking about it, I was told not to touch it and put it away, but it became a goal to figure out how to make it mine. It was so strange to me that my mom even owned it because I had never seen her use it. Time passed and when I started at a new high school that offered a darkroom photography class, I knew I finally had a reason to commandeer the camera.
I'd love to say that I was just naturally talented and took amazing photos those first few years, but YouTube didn't exist then, digital didn't exist then, and learning was a slow process. Yes, I did put in the effort to actually learn the ins-and-outs of exposure and darkroom developing and printing, but I didn't have a wealth of free and instantly available knowledge to me like people who start off with a new hobby do today, thanks to the internet. (I know, I sound a million years old.) There wasn't tons of great work out there easily accessible to compare yourself to. So basically my little wannabe goth self wandered around graveyards and the places of downtown that felt safe enough for a kid and I took weird photos that I thought were much more interesting than they actually were. Along the way I started collecting any weird old camera I could find at resale shops. I had a particular fondness for Kodak Brownie Hawkeyes and Argus Seventy-fives. I had a Lubitel 166 and a Holga before
lomography.com
was a thing. (Back then we didn't embrace light leaks, you learned on Flickr forums to paint the inside of your camera flat black and to gaff tape the living shit out of it.)
Fast forward to college where I took some photo classes, and the very first "digital imaging" class our university offered, which didn't involve digital cameras (still barely thing) but it did introduce me to Photoshop. Photography continued to be an interest but I didn't think it could be a "real job" - and when my camera kit was stolen out of my car that put a real damper on things. I replaced the camera, but the new one was never quite the same, it just didn't operate as nicely as the original FTb, and a lot of the magic was lost to me for years. I saved up for my dream film camera (the Canon Elan 7E - eye controlled focus!) bought some digital cameras here and there, but photography mostly was on the back burner for awhile.
This all changed pretty drastically around 2007. A bunch of pretty significant life events all happened in the space of a couple months. I returned back to Michigan from living in Florida, I almost immediately met my partner Andy, I bought my first house, and one of my dearest friends from college had a sister getting married and she asked me to be her wedding photographer. To say I was unprepared for this was a colossal understatement. I hadn't touched film in years, my current camera was very non-professional Sony Cybershot. (Maybe this one?) I explained that I was not the person for this job and was told that if I didn't do it, no one else would be doing it. So I found myself with a wedding booked. I immediately asked Andy to help me. We had a freakish amount of things in common, and one of them was a similar photography background. But he at least had a dSLR. He helped me pick out a Canon 40D, and we photographed that wedding. And surprise! We kinda pulled if off!
Not only that, we discovered we loved it. Wedding photojournalism was a new thing, and I was hooked. Having access to this intimate and pivotal part of someone's life, and all the emotions that went with it was fascinating and felt important. The technical challenges involved in getting great shots no matter the weather, lighting, or level of your subject's inebriation appealed to the technical side of me. In college I had always bounced back and forth between creative classes and technical ones. I would get bored focusing on one and go back to the other. Wedding photography scratched both the right and left sides of my brain.
We got good feedback from that first wedding, and tentatively put up a website and booked several more weddings the following year. Our first real photography business was born. By the 3rd year we were averaging 25ish bookings a year. Pretty much every nice weekend May - October we had events booked. After about 7 years shooting weddings, and fully burnt out from rarely having a weekend free during the nicest part of the year, we started to transition to another genre. My day job involved real estate and we started getting requests to shoot houses. What started as an occasional thing spiraled into another full-fledged business,
Stylish Detroit - which is now a full service real estate media company. We have a team of 9 photographers & videographers currently, plus photo & video editors.
As the company grew and we hired more people, and we were able to scale back on our real estate shooting, which was fine because after shooting your 100th or 1500th house, the mystery is kind of gone. We evolved two side brands, one for portraits/branding (The Shot Shop) and another for commercial/product photography (Phlora).
Between these different brands, we have a lot of work to keep us busy, but as a result we both stopped taking photos for the enjoyment of photography.
I realized one day that it had been a long, long, loooooooong time since I had taken a photo for me. The burnout from our wedding photography days had creeped back. I no longer followed photography blogs, or looked at photography monographs, or really thought about photography the way I used to. And it bummed me out. I was so focused on what was necessary to have a viable photography business that paid the bills that I had lost everything that originally drew me to photography. I set out to change that.
So if you're still patiently reading through this, that's why this website exists. It felt quite silly to have been doing photography for two decades and not to have a website wholly dedicated to my own work. But more than just slapping a portfolio of personal work together, I really wanted a sketchbook and notepad of sorts. A place to talk about photography, throw up recent work, talk about cameras, techniques, and work that I'm intrigued with.
I've spent the last two years slowly falling back in love with photography and I wanted a place to document that.
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