My Path Back to Photography

When I was young there were two things I wanted to be more than anything - an astronomer and an Egyptologist.

I remember after dinners in my first childhood home, my dad would take me and my younger siblings out onto the porch and we would all lay down on our backs and look up at the stars. My dad may be an engineer, but deep down he has the soul of a poet, and he use to speak with wonder about what we were looking at above us in the night sky. That wonder took hold, and not a single day passes where I don’t marvel at the universe and our small, infinitesimal place and time within it.

A few years down the road when I was about eleven years old, we rented a little old movie called The Mummy. Now, The Mummy may be a cheesy (yet awesome) adventure movie with an unrealistic representation of ancient Egypt and archaeology, but it also sparked something in me, a fascination with this ancient culture that never left me. After that movie I begged my parents for every book on ancient Egyptian culture, a stamp kit with Egyptian hieroglyphs so I could learn to read and write the language, and I ate it all up voraciously.

Fast forward twenty years to the summer of 2021, just a few months before I finally go on the trip of a lifetime to Egypt.

I knew that I couldn’t capture one of the most important trips of my life on my phone. I knew I wanted to make an investment in a great camera that would travel with me as I begin shift my focus towards living my life for experiences. Travel has long been a passion of mine, and I had already decided that I was going to start spending my time and money on experiences that would enrich my life, instead of waiting until some magical, perfect day when it would be the right time financially.

A big part of this blog is going to be me diving into the technicalities of my experience researching cameras, lenses, filters, and reacquainting myself with photography and editing. Another big piece is going to be sharing my travel experiences, from the preparation ahead of time, to my time spent on the road, and information about what I learned or wish I’d known before.

But today, I just want to share how one little girl’s love for Egypt is what led her back into the world of photography years later, and how her love for nature and the cosmos instilled in her from a young age is what now inspires her art.