A common question I get asked, like a lot of us, is “Why did you decide to open a photography business, Kayla?” There is no one easy or comprehensive answer (but one I am trying to provide through a different, ongoing blog series I am slowly writing). One facet to the answer can be traced back to the summer of 2015. While I had always shot and had tried to work freelance, this had yet to become something official. I was in my second semester of work for my Masters in Arts in Communications, and I had enrolled in Multimedia Authoring. As an employee of Adobe, the instructor was beyond well-versed in the Creative Cloud programs, and required us to demonstrate some mastery of many of the applications, including Photoshop.

One thing led to another, and another…and by the end of the semester, I had turned my hobby into a business with my lifelong purpose at its heart: To tell your stories.

As I sat wringing out my brain to determine what to tell you this week, I was thinking a ton about that class and what it meant to me (this may be in part because I have entered the last phase of my thesis writing, and was feeling a little nostalgic about the last three years and all neurotic, nerve-racking “fun” graduate school has been). This procrastinating thought formed a tangent brought me from this my thesis Word document to this file to the Internet to YouTube, which reminded me of one thing.

I one time made a movie. And I liked it.

The goal this assignment? To mash together public domain video with new, self-created footage. This is what I created (and I still love it).

In finding a way to waste time, I really found something to write about: A list of multimedia goals for 2018.

If I could work on anything to make my creation game a little more on point, it would be these things:

To better serve you, I need to think outside the box of my Nikon D5; I need (and want) to be well-rounded, to avoid being restricted by the square of the cropmarks.