The Back Cover of She Shoots, Volume 42

A little bit of good news I’ve been meaning to share.

My work is the back cover of She Shoots Magazine, Volume 42, and there’s a full feature on me inside it.

She Shoots is an independent print and digital magazine that celebrates women photographers, artists, makers, models, mothers, and creative business owners. What I love about it is how much room they give the work. Your images aren’t crammed into the corner of a crowded page with forty other people. You get full pages, you get a story around them, and you can feel how much care went into it.

The issue was about losing your spark

The theme of Volume 42 is When the Camera Feels Heavy, and one of the article titles is Losing Your Spark Doesn’t Mean You Lost Your Gift. Which made me laugh a little, because that is pretty much my last few years.

Life got full for a few years. We moved, we had the baby, we got married, and somewhere in there I set the camera down. It wasn’t a decision I made on purpose. It just kept not happening, and then it had been about two years, and something that used to be the most meaningful part of my life had quietly turned into a thing I used to do. I’d see other photographers’ work, feel that pull, and close the app.

What brought me back was a session with a client I’ve had for years. That’s it. One session. I got home, started editing, and remembered how much I love this.

What they printed

The feature covers why I do this, which for me comes down to watching people interact with those who love them most. That’s the thing I’m always waiting for with my camera up. The half second after the posed smile, when the toddler grabs mom’s hair and spins.

They pulled this quote for a full page, about my boys:

I hope they see how much it lights me up to do something that I love.

Seeing that in print got me a little teary.

The feature also gets into something I don’t talk about much. My mom is the reason I do any of this. She was the one with the camera in our house, always documenting, always catching us mid-something. She shot Nikon, and all these years later so do I, which is not really a coincidence. Every time I raise the camera to my eye I’m doing a thing she taught me to love without ever sitting me down to teach it.

I lost her when I was young. She took plenty of photos of me and my sister, but there aren’t many pictures of all of us together, because she was always the one behind the camera. It’s a specific kind of missing, and I didn’t really understand it until I was older.

So when I’m photographing a family and mom says “oh, I don’t need to be in this one,” I gently push back. Get in the photo. You are going to look so much better in it than you think you will, and your kids are going to want to see your face someday.

None of us know how much time we get with the people we love. That’s the part I think about now in a way I didn’t used to.

Memory is softer than we want it to be. Voices fade, and the details you were sure you would never forget go quiet without asking permission. A photograph doesn’t do that. It sits there and holds the moment exactly as it was, for as long as you need it to.

In the feature I said that photography means freezing the moment we’re living in now, and I meant every word of it. I want kids and parents to have these images to look back on and cherish for years to come. It’s something I wish I had more of for myself.

Where I am now

I’m back on the coast and shooting again, and it still feels a little like getting away with something.

Most of my sessions right now are families along the Monterey Peninsula, Carmel River Beach, Pacific Grove, the eucalyptus grove, plus a lot of vacationing families who want photos while they’re here. I’m also still driving back to Folsom for the families I photographed for years before the move, and I have no plans to stop. I love those people.

If you’re a photographer reading this

If your camera has felt heavy lately, I hope you’ll take this as your sign. Mine mostly sat in my bag for two years and the work still came back, gently, when I was ready for it.

And if you’ve been thinking about submitting somewhere, submit. I almost didn’t. She Shoots says right on their site that you don’t need a certain follower count or years of experience or a traditional career path, and I read that about four times before I let myself believe it applied to me too.

Thank you

Thank you to She Shoots for the space, and to the families in these frames for letting me into a real moment of your day. Every image in that feature exists because somebody trusted me with their people, and I don’t take that lightly.

If you’re here on the Monterey Peninsula, or coming out for a trip and you’d love some family photos, I would be so happy to hear from you. Email me or text me at 831-328-3113 🙂

Warmly,
Brittany
Britt Honey Photography