I started my photography journey in 2020. My cousin Tre picked up photography from our uncle, and from then on out, we both got hooked. I didn't own a camera until 2021, but we would go to downtown Austin and take each other's portraits. I spent my first ever paycheck on a Canon Rebel T7, like pretty much everyone else. I would take photos of any and everything. Taking the photos was fun, but my favorite part was, and probably always will be, the editing process.
I started with basic presets I found on the internet, and then eventually taught myself the ins and outs of Adobe Lightroom. I would adjust color and add grain until I eventually developed my style. One of my friends described it as looking into a memory, and ever since then, I've been in pursuit of that. I love the film-look, turning low quality into art, and using color and framing to turn something "bad" into something great. I finally picked up Photoshop a couple of years ago, and it has made the editing process even more enjoyable.
In 2023, I went to a music festival called "Re:set" and brought along a cheap Sony Handicam to film everything. I initially bought it for videos because I was a film student at the time, but I still wanted to take some photos. I figured out the camera had a photo function, but it was pretty terrible. Instead, while editing, I would take stills from the videos and edit them as photos. There was one of Clairo that I thought was great. Low-quality, but I leaned into the grain and fed off of the framing. I posted it the night of the show, and woke up to messages from all of my friends. Somehow, Clairo had seen the photo and posted it to her personal Instagram grid. That kicked off my concert photography career. I decided to keep shooting shows, and I now work for Off Record Media and have covered over 30 acts. Clairo deleted the photo after a couple of years, but, funnily enough, in 2024 she posted a different photo I took at another one of her shows.
