It's lovely to meet you, my name is Kelly.
I'm a Houston girl that currently calls Dallas home. I find immense joy in creating Timeless, Poetic, and Genuine work with my clients, who often turn into friends.
Photos by Cassidy Wilfong. Taken on a fall day in Norfolk, VA during an afternoon of exploring with cameras in hand. You can find more of Cassidy's art, including her beautiful quilting work, at @cassidyelisequilts. Edits are my own.
My story of art, light, and becoming.
When friends ask me "when did you start doing photography?" my answer is, I don't think I started doing photography. I became a photographer.
My interest in cameras and using them to create art has been a constant. I used to tote around a yellow toy camera, build make believe old fashioned cameras out of cereal boxes and cardboard scraps, have polaroid photo shoots with my beloved stuffed animals. My mother was kind enough to trust me around the neighborhood pool with her first DSLR on summer Saturday swim meets, and while climbing up stone ruins on our family travels. As a teenager I always had a compact digital in my purse, and roamed the school hallways with a Nikon around my neck for the school newspaper. My favorite college memories are mornings spent with my roommate, traipsing out into the field behind our house to use each other as subjects for our weekly photography class assignments. I started getting texts from friends asking if I would take graduation photos on campus, from nervously excited college cadets arranging surprise proposal photos under a certain campus tree with storied romantic tradition, and from moms of high schoolers across Houston inquiring about my senior photography offerings. I was in awe that someone would want me to be a part of their big moments. I went off to France for a summer and found myself sitting around the table with an elderly french woman who worked as a photographer long ago. She looked down at a photo I had taken in Paris, looked up, and said "artiste". That was the first time my ears heard what I had known but not been able to name. My perspective on photography fell into place.
Somewhere between the plushie polaroids, borrowed "big cameras", photo essay final exams, and Parisian rooftops I started noticing. I saw the way the light glowed over the city as the sun set in Istanbul. My eyes lingered on the way light danced through leaves at my grandmother's farmhouse, and graced over the cheekbones of faces around me. I felt the light of my dad's smile in the last photos taken in the house we called home. The best photography advice I've been given is to "shoot it how it felt". Sustained by love, light, and lots of coffee, I became a photographer. And I would love to be yours.
