My creative inspiration: what fills my cup

There's a question I get asked occasionally - usually by other photographers, sometimes by clients who are curious about the person behind the camera - that I've never quite known how to answer in a sentence or two. It goes something like: where do you get your inspiration? And I always want to give an honest answer, but the honest answer is long and a little meandering and doesn't fit neatly into a conversation. So this is my attempt to give it the space it deserves. Because I do think about this - probably more than most people realize - and I think the answer matters, not just as a personal essay, but as a window into why I photograph the way I do.

The short version is this: I am a person who is fed by beauty in ordinary things. Not grand, dramatic, curated beauty - the other kind. The kind that shows up when you're not looking for it. A patch of afternoon light on a kitchen floor. The way a child's hand looks when it's tucked inside a parent's. The particular stillness of a field just before golden hour, when the light hasn't quite arrived but you can feel it coming. That's the world I'm drawn to, and it's the world I try to bring into my photography. Understanding where that sensitivity comes from - what keeps it alive - feels worth talking about.

Nature is the thing I come back to most.

I grew up in Michigan, which means I grew up surrounded by water and trees and seasons that actually change. And I think that shaped me in ways I'm still discovering. There is something about being outside - really outside, not just passing through - that resets something in me that no other experience can reach. A walk in the woods before a session clears my head and puts me back in my body. Standing at the edge of a lake at dusk, watching the light go sideways across the water, fills me up in a way that's hard to articulate but impossible to miss. I notice things outdoors that I don't notice anywhere else. I think that attention - that state of really looking - is what I'm trying to bring into my photography, and being in nature is how I keep it sharp.

Film and light - I'm a visual person through and through.

Movies are one of my deepest creative wells. Not necessarily the stories, though I love a good story - but the light. The way a cinematographer builds a world out of shadow and color. The way certain directors use natural light so precisely that every frame looks like a painting that happened to move. I watch films with the sound off sometimes, just to study the light. I take screenshots. I build mood boards. I think about how a specific quality of light I saw in a film might translate to a session at golden hour or an overcast morning in the woods. This might sound obsessive, and it might be, but I think it's also just what it means to take visual craft seriously. You have to feed the eye or the eye goes flat.

My clients, more than they probably know.

Here's something I don't say often enough: my clients inspire me. The nervous first-time mom who shows up to her maternity session unsure of herself and leaves glowing. The couple who hasn't really looked at each other in months and then, somewhere in the middle of an anniversary session, something cracks open and I catch it. The dad who spends the first twenty minutes of a family session trying to wrangle his kids and then, the moment he stops trying and just playswith them, becomes the most beautiful subject in the frame. These moments are not incidental to my work. They are my work. And they remind me, over and over, why I do this - which is its own kind of inspiration.

Reading, and not about photography.

I read a lot - novels mostly, some poetry, occasional essays that wander into questions about beauty and memory and what it means to pay attention. Annie Dillard. Mary Oliver. Toni Morrison. Writers who look at the world the way I want to photograph it: closely, without flinching, with an appreciation for what's small and fleeting and real. I've found that the best creative fuel for photography doesn't always come from photography. It comes from any discipline that asks you to slow down and really see - and literature does that as well as anything I've encountered. A paragraph that stops me cold, a line of poetry that names something I've felt but never articulated - those things find their way into my work in ways I can't always trace but can always feel.

Seasons, and the way Michigan keeps changing.

I know I've said this in other posts and I'll probably say it again: I feel genuinely lucky to live and shoot in a place with four real seasons. The bare gray trees of February. The particular green of Michigan in early June that doesn't exist anywhere else I've been. The way October light has a warmth that seems almost borrowed from somewhere else, like the sun knows it's about to leave and is trying to make it last. Every season brings a different palette, a different quality of light, a different kind of beauty - and that rotation keeps me from going stale. Just when I've had enough of golden fields, the snow comes and changes everything. I don't think I could shoot in the same weather every day and maintain the same level of creative engagement. The seasons keep me present.

My own family - the people I photograph at home.

It would be strange to talk about creative inspiration without mentioning the people I come home to. My family is my first and most constant subject - not in a formal, posed way, but in the sneaky, opportunistic way that photographers tend to document the people they love. The ordinary Tuesday mornings. The light at the dinner table. The small moments that aren't occasions but feel important anyway. Photographing my own people keeps me honest. It reminds me what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a camera - a little self-conscious, a little hopeful - and it keeps me in practice for finding images in everyday life, not just on session days. The photos I take at home are often my most personal and sometimes my most technically interesting, because there's no pressure and no agenda.

Rest, when I actually let myself have it.

This one took me a long time to learn. For years I thought the way to stay creatively inspired was to keep working - more sessions, more education, more content, more output. And eventually I hit walls that I couldn't shoot or study my way through. I was depleted, and depleted photographers don't make their best images. Rest is now something I treat as a genuine creative practice: long weekends where I don't pick up a camera. Mornings that start slowly. Time in the garden or on a trail that has no photographic agenda whatsoever. The paradox of creativity is that filling your cup requires you to occasionally put the cup down. I believe that now in a way I didn't when I was newer and more afraid of stopping.

The sessions that stay with me.

Some sessions change the way you work. Not because they went perfectly - sometimes the most formative ones are the ones that went sideways and taught you something - but because something happened in them that expanded what you thought was possible. A client who surprised you. A moment of light you weren't expecting. A connection between two people so genuine it made you hold your breath behind the viewfinder. I carry these sessions the way some people carry songs - they come back to me when I'm setting up for a new client, when I'm trying to solve a compositional problem, when I need a reminder of why this work matters. They are part of my creative DNA now. They live in how I see.

Inspiration is not a stable resource. It ebbs and flows, gets depleted and replenished, comes from expected places and completely surprising ones. What I've learned after years of doing this work is that tending to your creative life is as much a part of the job as the technical skills and the business logistics. A photographer who isn't actively feeding their curiosity and their sense of wonder will eventually run out of things to say with a camera. That's not something I'm willing to let happen. So I keep walking in the woods. I keep reading. I keep watching the light change. I keep showing up for my clients with full attention and an open eye. And most days - most good days - that's enough.