Why You'll See the Same Faces in My Portfolio

If you've spent any time scrolling through my galleries, you may have noticed something: a few faces keep showing up, at different ages, in different seasons, over and over again. There's a reason for that.

Client privacy matters to me, a lot. Not every family who books me wants their images used publicly, and I respect that completely. It means my portfolio doesn't always reflect the full range of work I do, since much of it remains private between the people I photograph and me.

So who fills in the gaps? My own family, and sometimes the people who love them too.

I'm a proud mom and a proud sister, and both sides of my family have become some of my most consistent subjects over the years. My sister's boys show up from their very first days as newborns, tiny and wrapped up, all the way through toddlerhood exploring train tracks and grassy parks, into their teenage years in suits and dress shirts, taller than her now in the family portraits. I've photographed them in Arizona's desert light more than once, watching them grow up one session at a time.

My own kids are all over my portfolio too, senior portraits in the golden light of fall, prom photos by the water, graduation day at Colorado School of Mines. And since teenagers rarely show up to these things alone, you'll occasionally spot their friends in the frame as well, another prom date, another graduate walking the same lawn.

Photographing your own family and the people orbiting around them comes with a kind of freedom that client work doesn't always allow. I can experiment more, try a new pose or a different light setup, and post the results without worrying about anyone's privacy. It also means you're seeing something a little more personal than a typical portfolio: real growth, real years passing, real relationships, not just staged sessions.

So if you notice the same handful of people showing up again and again across a decade of images, now you know why. They're not clients. They're the people I love most, and the friends who tagged along, generously letting me point a camera at them for years, so that everyone else gets to see what I'm capable of.