Hey my name is Tuuli and this is my story!
When I was trying to think of the first post on here I came up with a million ideas with tech, creativity, reviews you name it. But I felt like the first post to the whole website should have a bit of me in it. So I figured I would post a little bit of my story and how I got to where I am. TLDR I got a camera loved it, bought a fancy one loved it more, put off following my dreams for years and now here I am.
Let’s start with a comparison of your childhood to mine… did your parents ever just take out a large video camera and start recording? Well mine did, I vividly remember every single Christmas my father pulling out a large camera to record family footage on a VCR tape. What we did with those I don’t know, but I alway thought the camera was amazing!
As I got older my mother started taking photos of my two brothers and I during our hockey games with a Canon DSLR. I was never allowed to touch this camera unless it was in the camera bag. At some point my grandfather bought my siblings and I small point and shoots, that honestly you could barely get footage off of; but all of us were amazed by the abilities this camera had. Little did I know…
Around the time I got into high school, I was finally trusted to use my mother’s camera. It was bulky, slow and honestly not made for sports photography. But I made it work during games. I spent years in an ice rink learning how to use a DSLR on manual mode while freezing my fingers off. The photos I took got better and better as I went so I started sharing them on Shutterfly so that the other parents could have images of their kids. Shockingly enough to me at the time, many of the parents ordered prints of their kids and even used them for Christmas cards.
Then the true love happened, I was on a camping trip with my family and I had just had ankle surgery. At this point you can only read so many books, before you get bored of doing nothing. I ended up taking my mother camera and just shooting random things… birds, rocks, my brother on his bike and the one that I truly fell in love with. I took a photo of our dog at the time at sun set. She was on a bench looking back at something that caught her eye, the sun was setting and everything was orange behind her. This image made me see how beautiful something can be in a camera and how the world can be captured so perfectly…. this image had no editing and immediately became my favorite photo.
After that I was hooked. I started taking photos for everything, it was known by my family that the camera was coming with me. I eventually made a deal with my parents to get my own camera. One Christmas I convinced them to pay for half of a Canon Rebel T5, which at the time was one of the best starting cameras. I got two kit lens’s with it and started shooting that day.
From then on out I had my camera with me, I started taking photos of anything and everything I could.
Why I continue to take photos….
Photography is a different way of seeing the world. I find joy in showing others their beauty, I find joy in finding the beauty in everything around me. During College I took a Women in STEM course and they asked what we could each contribute to the class, as this was much more then just a class it was a community. So I started bringing my camera to class and taking photos of the activities we did and the places we went. I was able to document so much of this course for the professors which helped with funding. But that wasn’t even my why…
On the last day of this class I was given multiple cards, with hand written notes in it. Every single card had a thank you in it, as I read each card I started to see how much of an impact my photos had on these girls lives. The one that stood out the most to me was the one that said
“Thank you for showing me how beautiful I am, you have shown me a part of myself that I never knew existed. I have always had a bad self image and somehow every time you photograph me you make me love myself so much more!”
After I read the note, the individual walked up to me and hugged me, with tears in her eyes she gave me a simple “Thank You!”. Later that year I got some insight on that individual, she had struggles with her body and finding herself beautiful. She had struggled with fitting in with those around her, thinking her body wasn’t the same. She compared herself to others on a constant basis, but when she looked at the photos of herself she saw someone she recognized and liked it. Seeing herself through someone else’s eyes in the most candid ways possible actually helped her get through the year as she was struggling in many ways. I was able to bring love for herself into her life and was able to bring a smile to her face. That meant everything to me.
Additionally, I was most recently reminded a few months ago why I love taking photos. This past summer one of my best friends was having a really rough day, so much so that we ended up standing in a parking lot just venting about life. As we stood there after a rain storm, we watched a double rainbow appear. Out of the blue I asked if she wanted a photo with her jeep, she said yes out of a… yah I guess that would be cool. Well we got her jeep in place and I started doing my thing, we took photos for all of 10 minutes. Using my camera she didn’t get to see them right away, so I got in my car she went home and I started editing photos. within twenty minutes she had a few photos of her jeep with her and that rainbow.
Later that night she posted these on Facebook, captioned “Best part of my day today.” I was able to put a smile on her face simply by taking some photos of her. Even with her day being as rough as it was it made her happy for just a second.
So to finish up this post, I still do photography because it makes me happy, to bring joy to other people. To be able to capture other peoples moments and know that they will cherish those photos for years and even one day show them to their children. Being able to provide memories of happy, sad or even just random moments in someone’s life is an amazing thing to share.