I love doing year end recap blog posts. It’s fantastic to be able to see all of my favorite photos in one place, reminisce about every one of my amazing clients & moments I captured during the year, but it also serves as a great record to be able to look back and see improvement over the years. As a creative, I can be prone to missing the forest for the trees and thinking I’m not improving my skills when I actually am. You can take a look back on my past years’ posts here-
I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for 5 years now! Putting these posts together is one of the most daunting tasks I do every year besides getting everything ready for my taxes 😛 This year, DELIVERED over 14900 photos to my clients. That means I edited that many, that’s not the number of photos I took total. I don’t even want to know how many I took!
Every year, I think to myself, how could next year possibly top this year? And every year I meet more awesome people and get to travel to more amazing places and get to experience and document more amazing moments. This year, I got to travel to Palm Springs/Joshua Tree to a creative photographer/model retreat and expand my photography comfort zone by shooting some editorial work, travel to & shoot a Manhattan wedding, shoot at two of my favorite venues- Schnepf Farms & Saguaro Lake Ranch, shot at new venues like Desert Foothills and Gold Canyon Golf Resort & Desert Botanical Gardens, have a bride jump into the pool at her reception and get underwater photos of that happening. I shot some amazing elopements including a super remote elopement in northern Arizona requiring 56 miles of driving on a dirt road, followed by another 6 miles of off roading, sweet Superstition Mountains & Salt River elopements. I also shot the families of some past wedding clients which almost made me cry happy tears seeing everyone again and documenting their new chapter of life. I’ll be blogging a separate blog post about my top favorite moments of 2017 and I still have a ton of work still to blog- some amazing elopements, a stunning and creative alternative styled shoot that is getting picked up by a big wedding blog you’ve definitely heard of, and lots of family sessions from the fall. I can’t wait to tackle my blogging queue and share it all with you! All in all this is a super sappy post of how grateful for all of the amazing opportunities I’ve been given this year. Truly, I can’t ever express my gratitude to each and every one of my clients and supporters letting me do this for a living.
On a more personal note this year, this was our first full year living in our house we bought and we got chickens in April & a puppy in June! She’s been a handful but once she gets out of her puppy stage she will be a sweetheart. With now 3 dogs, a cat, a tortoise & 7 chickens, that officially makes us crazy animal people & wannabe suburban farmers, I think.
I’m really looking forward to the spring Arizona wedding season! I still have some openings in my calendar, so if you know anyone looking for an Arizona wedding photographer or thinking about eloping, I’d love if you sent them my info. I have an amazing outdoor Arizona wedding venue guide and amazing locations to elope in Arizona. Hope you all had a wonderful 2017 and an even better 2018!
