I was twenty three when I moved back to my hometown. I remember being nervous, feeling slightly defeated, but I also remember how hard I fell on ice that winter with my laptop flying out of my arms and onto the ground. My lease was up in the summer but I was so over the snowy cold Februarys and the blistering Julys. I had to get the hell out of there as soon as I possibly could. And you know what they always say, there’s no place like home. Except I didn’t have a business back home. Or at least I thought I didn’t.

Local photographers had public feelings about my move back home. As an early twenty something just starting out this business, I didn’t think about it at all. This was just what I had figured out that worked for me. I mean hell, I started taking photos of birds in my backyard when I was sixteen. I never picked up a camera thinking it would make me money, I just enjoyed it. People came to me asking to pay me for photos and even then I didn’t think I could turn photography into a business. I had to work alongside a seasoned wedding photographer for an entire summer before I realized that a creative can make a living wage doing something they actually enjoy. So I dove right in.

I started making money in rodeo city, aka the city where I slipped on ice and threw my laptop across the yard. Why was I holding my laptop outside in the snow? Who knows. It felt like the finale of a bad sitcom though. I had a lousy roommate who skipped out on rent at least three months in a row, I had just dropped out of college to pursue a creative job, I broke up with a guy I wasn’t even really dating—it felt like a lot all at once. So I packed up my shit and left.

If I’m being totally honest, I don’t remember a lot of the transition from moving to the east side of the mountains back to the coast where I grew up, but I do remember a very long Facebook message from a lady approximately ten years older than me who also owned a full frame DSLR camera. I haven’t done much research, but I think we started photography around the same time. She was upset that I was moving back home and taking her clients. I had not yet moved back home and I had not yet taken on any clients in my small coastal town, population: 1746. Yes, my full time job was photography, but I had weddings booked on the east side of the mountains for at least a full year post move-back-home-date and I had a car that could get me there so I wasn’t super concerned about finding new clientele in my hometown. To be totally honest with you, I didn’t even really want to stay that long. I was just trying to catch my breath.

I ignored the message, I put my head down, I kept working. I kept enjoying photography for what it was. Of course I played into it a little with close friends because duh, I was young and dumb. If someone talked shit to me, I talked shit about them. And, sure, I looked once or twice at what she was up to after she brought herself to my attention.

The thing that got me about this local photographer calling me out for moving back home was essentially that we didn’t even do the same kind of photography. At the time, I was exclusively shooting weddings in barns with candlelit mason jars, burlap covered tables, and sunflower bouquets. My twenty three year old self couldn’t be bothered with small sticky children not looking at the camera because they were too busy staring at the cake they didn’t know they were supposed to smash. But I could feel her eyes on me.

Fast forward almost ten years and the niche is different but the local uh, competition seems to remain the same. In the sense that there are a couple people in the area who take photos but differently. At twenty three, maybe I cared, maybe I checked what everyone else was doing, but at thirty two, I only care what I’m doing.

There isn’t one photographer for one town. There isn’t one anything for one town. Photographers have different styles, different niches, different lives. It’s not about others encroaching on your space. Do what you love and people will find you. This economy is brutal, yes, but at the end of the day, we started doing this because we loved it. Maybe not every photographer out there crouched down in the hallway of their childhood home to capture a new angle of light streaming in through midcentury modern windows, but we all started somewhere. The ability to create is not something everybody has. We have something unique. We have something that should be shared.

I learned the most when I stopped trying to get everyone's attention and just started paying attention myself. I wasn't worried about anyone else. I was worried about catching golden hour, waking up for sunrises, bringing my camera with me everywhere again just in case something caught my eye. Sixteen years into this and I fell back in love with just taking photos, with preserving memories. It pays the bills, sure, but that was never really the point. There's a version of success for everyone that isn't about anybody else.