Shadowbear Photography {Engagements, Weddings & Boudoir} – South Florida

It’s time to update my audience. Small, but loyal! ;D Thank you for taking the time to stop by and catch up with me on all my crazy endeavors.

So, I want to begin by telling you all how absolutely stoked I am. STOKED!!! The other morning I came up with an idea as I was getting ready to head out to the office. I decided to somewhat reinvent my company, now that I know what I want to really focus on, and a good place to start would be to plan a styled wedding shoot by gathering a bunch of my truly amazing friends and vendors and really do something magical together. Of course, in my head I knew exactly what I wanted, but I still had to convince another like 20 people that we could totally rock this. Ahhh! I started yesterday by getting in touch with a ton of people. Facebook, Twitter, Etsy… I love you. ;D I heard back from my models, makeup artist, stylist, couture designer friends and more. Guess what? They all said YES! And today got even better, I got a yes from everyone else! Even people that don’t even know me, want to support this. I’m so blessed and so thankful. I spent most of the morning with my friend, who happens to be a super talented event designer/coordinator. We brainstormed and have gotten so much more inspired than I ever thought we could be. We now know the general theme, colors, flowers we want to use, etc. I have designers making dresses, hair pieces, signs, etc. There’s SO MUCH going on! This is like a real wedding almost. Hahaha! I couldn’t be happier and more proud. I’ve surrounded myself with such sweet and talented friends. There’s no drama, just fun and creativity. I’m so looking forward to the shoot. It’ll be in late September and we’re planning for it to be at a very organic place. We actually have a specific horse ranch in mind. Let’s cross our fingers so we get the OK! So, if I’m kinda quiet around the blog it’s because my mind is going a million miles a minute and I’m trying to get everything ready before my trip to NYC (Fashion Week, remember? Yay!), so by the time I come back most things are in place and it’ll be somewhat smooth sailing until the big day.

Something else I’ve been doing is watching and LEARNING SO MUCH from Jasmine Star. I’ve been watching her workshop for days. She’s too cool! I also have a shoot this weekend and two shoots next week. Wish me luck!

Again, thank you! Even though I don’t get too many comments on every entry, I know you guys are reading this because when I see you all you know EVERYTHING! It’s great! I’m not just talking to myself! LOL I appreciate it! But for real, HUGE thanks to my boyfriend. He is my #1 fan. Always there to hear my crazy ideas and helping me and just being so darn awesome.

Stay tuned! xoxo

I spent a good 90 minutes or so listening to a live streaming of Jasmine Star and Chase Jarvis‘s Q&A and I am PUMPED! I can honestly say that I’ve never felt such a strong “I CAN DO THIS!” feeling since I started this whole new career. I’m so grateful for all the wonderful things that have been said about my work. I can’t express how amazing it has been to receive calls and all kinds of social media messages showing me so much love. I feel so fortunate to have such a great support system. I never thought a Christmas gift from my boyfriend would turn into this, but I’m so glad. But… this is only the beginning! I’m currently working on my portfolio site and I have a wedding booked for November. I’m ecstatic!

Speaking of my portfolio, I’ve been working on the site for a couple of days now and it has dawned on me how crazy critical I am of my own work. So much so that I don’t even know what to put up. These are the same pictures I was once so proud of. Same pictures I’ve been praised for a million times. For whatever reason, now they don’t look so great to me. I’m freaking out! I’m second guessing everything. From the actual shot to the editing. I’m so annoyed with myself! LOL Besides my portfolio, I’m also putting my foot down about the kind of shoots I want to do and pricing. When I first started, I was taking pictures of anything and anyone for free. Now (almost a year in), I know what I want to shoot and how much I think I’m worth. As much as I may want to do favors all day long, I just can’t. I still have a full time job. I have a boyfriend. I have a family. We’re trying to buy a house, we’re trying to do a million things. I can’t spend every weekend taking pictures of things I don’t want to take pictures of. I know that may sound selfish, but I want to be passionate about my career. I want to love every minute of it. I want to be inspired. In order to do this, I need to set boundaries and I need to follow my heart. My heart tells me that I should only do engagements, weddings and boudoirs. My heart is also telling me that I need to believe in myself and my work and if I do, then I will be successful. Jasmine Star started four years ago. She, like me, picked up a camera one day and decided to become a wedding photographer. She’s such an inspiration. I’m so glad she’s out there giving people like me advice and the drive to really do this.

I took the pictures below while waiting to be seated at Kitchen 305. The quality is not so great because I took them with my iPhone, but my boyfriend’s crazy faces make up for it. He looks normal in pictures on very rare occasions. We joke around about it ALL THE TIME. In fact, when we travel we purposely take crazy pictures just to show them to my mom. She then threatens to not frame them as if there weren’t already a million pictures of us all over the house. The funny thing is that whenever I feel as though I look great in a picture, that’s the one picture where my boyfriend’s face is just something out of this world. Like something out of an Aliens movie. Seriously! I know that someday, when I’m all old and wrinkly, we’ll be showing our grandchildren pictures of when we were young and they will be thinking, “WTF, Grandpa?”. Hahaha! ;D