Welcome!

If you don't already know me... Hi! My name is Cassie. I'm your friendly neighborhood kilted highland games photographer. Most of my days start like many of yours, I put my kilt on one buckle at a time and spend an hour prefecting my "messy" bun. Where things get a little different is when I pick up that crazy contraption some call a "camera".

So, Here's My Story...

It all started a LONG time ago. I have been love with cameras and taking pictures for most of my life. One year, my dad got me an Olympus "something or other" for Christmas. It was a simple point and shoot camera, nothing super fancy, not interchangeable lenses and probably had a max of 2 megapixels, woah. I had never taken any sort of photography class, there weren't Youtube tutorials or CreativeLive classes to take. I just used my natural curiosity of technology to mess with settings and see what happened. These were some of the first photos I ever took. They can still be found proudly displayed in my Facbook Photo Album labeled "Photography". As you can tell, I was not a photographic prodigy... But, I was able to get the camera to produce natural bokeh without any control of the F-stop just but using different focal lengths and subject distances. Not that I understood ANY of that at the time... I just knew how to get it to look a certain way.

The top view of a can of hair mousse

Me in my favorite blue jeans (at the time), with my feet on the dash next to a orange hedgehog toy. Riveting stuff.

Then...

It Gets Complicated

After my frist Olympus "Something or Other" broke, (or was BROKEN by someone, but we won't bring THAT up because I'm obviously over it...) I got another little "point and shoot" camera though I don't remember much about it. I kept taking pictures but my LOVE for photography didn't really start until went to my first high school black and white FILM photography class. Mr. Tylczak genuinely changed my life. First, we learned to make and use a pinhole camera and develope the photo paper. When we got the chemicals and timing down, we moved on to the cameras and the art of film processing and enlarging. I struggled to get SEMI decet grades in that class, to be honest... But it was those expriences that would drive me to be the passionate mediocre semi pro I am today.

The view from my bedroom window

Out of the Flames...

And Into the Fire

After my high school photo classes my mom gave me her Canon AE-1 to use in my college film classes. I was determined to get an associate degree in art and become a world class, super famous, mega rich photographer (obviously, I keep my expectations low)... I continued to struggle getting SEMI decent grades and began to think "maybe I don't have what it takes..." As the teachers aid continued to nitpick my images and nothing I did made them look better (to him), I began looking back at my images from high school and thought "yeah, I peaked... this is probably the end of my 'career'".

After my black and white film class ended I switched to color film since I could go get it developed instead of having to do it myself.

I put down my film camera and after a minute I moved into the digital age. I spent $300 on a Nikon D3000 kit. It came with a super basic 18-55mm zoom lens. It was insane that you could take a decent quality picture and just look at it, IMMEDIATELY.

It was quite the transition from black and white film to digital color.

I still struggle with color thoery and correction to this damn day...