The past 10 years have been a whirlwind of personal and professional growth. 

While I have been somewhat non-committed to my blogging, I challenged myself to go through my external hard drives and select a photo (or two) from each year, starting with 2009. This exercise was surprisingly meditative and a retrospective way to wrap up this year/decade. Below you will see some photos that I may have already shared on social and some that I haven’t, but each photo represents a moment in time of change. 

June 2009 was the end of undergrad and the beginning of my professional career as a photographer. I spent all of that summer of 2009 - winter 2012 focusing on the music scene in Seattle and all the characters surrounding it. Photographing live shows, creating promo materials for print and digital, and living and breathing all things related to music. 

In December 2012, I left it all behind for a new life in New York and only a year later, I realized that being only being a music photographer wasn’t going to cut it and I needed to widen my focus a bit. In 2014, Janae Sprouts was born. This brand was synergy of my various nanny gigs and my job as a barista in Brooklyn at a popular family-friendly cafe. 

In the summer of 2015, I quit my nanny and barista hustle to pursue photography full time. I had a steady stream of clients and referrals from Sprouts and also began assisting two world renowned photographers. I also taught a 6 week documentary photo class at the Courtelyou Library to kids from the ages of 6-18. Needless to say, that year I learned A LOT and became stronger technically as a photographer than ever before. 

The beginning of 2016, I got the opportunity of a lifetime to create photography for an upcoming podcast series on Audible with a former crime reporter turned documentarian. After almost a full year of the freelance hustle, I was ready for something more steady and landed a job at Etsy. While my role wasn’t 100% creative, it enabled me to connect with so many creatives and widen my network and idea of what was possible with a FT job. I was connecting with other artists again! This time, not just musicians; jewelry makers, yoga instructors, artisans, chefs, and fashion designers. All who were also working FT! That job also allowed me to travel to Europe for the first time, which is an opportunity that I missed in undergrad. Dublin, Berlin, London, and Paris! Since then, I’ve traveled to even more places in Europe in 2017 and 2018, and have continued to connect with more creatives, though I’m no longer working at Etsy.

This year was the hardest year thus far, mostly because there wasn’t enough time or space for innovation. FT work and life blurred together and because of that I grew a lot professionally but less so creatively.