Why I Started

My daughter at the beach

I started taking photos for my daughter.

My daughter is blind. Actually, the appropriate term is visually impaired. Because if you’re anything like I was, you have a lot of misconceptions about what “blind” means. Here’s a start: blind often means you can see, just differently.

To my daughter, among other things, it means that she wants to see things BIGGER. She wants to touch, to explore. For a cat at her grandmother’s house, that’s fine. But that lion at the zoo? She wants to know what it is. She wants to experience it the way everyone else does. She wants to see it, just bigger.

Okay, so we take a picture.

But phone cameras, for all their glories, suck at making things bigger. If you’ve ever blown up an cell phone photo into a print you know what I mean. It’s blurry, a bit early 00’s video game-ish. It’s OKAY.

But I’ve never been a big fan of OKAY. (Even in the less passive-aggressive “ok” version.)

So a camera helps take better photos at a distance. But also for a distance.

With grandparents who don’t get to see their grandkids as often as they’d like, photos offer a gateway to shared experiences. And a way to share special moments in a way more enduring than social media posts.

Turns out, I love it, too, as a creative outlet for providing others with images that can move, emote, and remember.

So that’s why I started, taking photos for and of my daughter.