Washington D.C. Newborn and Family Photographer NPS Photography Celebrates a Major Milestone this January

The start of a new year is always prime time for reflection and even more so this month than most. Why, you might ask? Because this January marks 10 years of NPS Photography! This milestone is prompting me to take a walk down memory lane and share a bit more about the journey I’ve taken with my business in its first decade. 

Humble Beginnings

Those of you that know a little about me know about my love of kids and my years of experience working with children. I started my professional career as a teacher and then switched to stay-at-home-mom status for years while my three boys were young.

As a military wife, it made sense to be more hands on at home for those years. But when my husband, Mark, was deployed to Afghanistan in 2010 and early 2011, I needed a positive distraction and that’s when I started to pick up my camera more and more. I learned to shoot in manual mode and slowly but surely began practicing my skills on my children, my friends’ children and then full families before long. These sessions were all outdoors utilizing natural light.

In January 2013, I officially opened NPS Photography in Moore County, NC.

The Messy Middle

When I was first approached about doing a newborn session shortly after opening my doors, I enthusiastically said YES! After all, I had watched ALL the posing videos online and was a graduate of YouTube University. What I learned helped me to master studio lighting, create a home studio and build a collection of wraps and props for posing.

I shot studio newborn sessions from my home studio for nearly four years until opening my own studio outside of my home in 2017. It was in this studio where I offered some themed sessions (think Christmas PJ and Valentine’s minis and did my Month of the Military Child Project) and slowly began to drop the props (yes, I used all the baskets and buckets!) and offer more lifestyle-driven photos along with the posed ones – like the ones below. 

Cheers to 10 awesome years of NPS Photography

This, my friends, is where I felt the magic happen. I was so lit up by the lifestyle-driven, naturally lit family and newborn work that I decided to close my studio in 2020 and focus on doing this type of work primarily in clients’ homes. After a big move from North Carolina, I now live and serve clients in the Washington, D.C. area by offering natural light lifestyle family and newborn sessions that capture families authentically in the place they’re most themselves: home. This is truly where I feel most at home as a photographer, too. 10 years in, it’s good to have landed here. 

Where I’m Headed 

I love where I’ve landed and hope to do much more of this lifestyle-driven work in the years to come. A big part of working with me is my focus on ensuring clients have keepsake photo products from their session, and that will continue. As technology (and the world) evolves, the staying power of the printed photo remains. I’ll continue to offer outdoor sessions on a limited basis – newsletter subscribers will find out when these are offered first – but the focus of my work will always be capturing the unscripted joy and personality of your darling families in your homes. 

Might you be one of those families?