We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Cindy Valdez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Cindy, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Working with strobes and other types of artificial light. It’s not really an industry standard, but with the large number of “natural light photographers” flooding the field these days, it’s definitely less common. Being able to create any type of light I want and at any time that I want is incredibly freeing; my ability to work is never affected by the weather or the time of day, and is only limited by my own imagination.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

Dad’s family always seemed to have lots of snapshots in albums and family photos framed and hung on their walls, too. I used to love it whenever someone would get the photo albums out and start telling stories, reflecting on times when my dad and uncles were crushing it in their bowling league, for example, or when my parents had regular card games at the house with my aunts and uncles and there was that time someone got caught trying to cheat.

But my favorite thing was when we’d come across photos that included me. I loved to hear about the silly things I said or did when I was little, to see how much I’d grown through the years, and to hear about the relationships I had with my relatives. I felt connected to my family; I felt important, that my existence in this family mattered to them.

When I had children of my own, I wanted to give them that same feeling of importance. We were pretty poor in the early days, but I still made it a priority to get ahold of those cheap disposable cameras as often as possible and I took photos of our every day life whenever I could. Everything from sleepovers with friends and holidays with family to simple things like the kids helping to clean the house and cooking meals together.

I also made a big deal out of school portraits. We have a tradition in our family now that my kids look forward to every year. Each child has a frame with their current/most recent 8×10 school portrait in it. When the new school portrait would come in, we’d all gather around while we opened the frame and laid out each year’s portrait in chronological order. We’d talk about their growth and changes over the years, sharing memories from those ages. Then we’d put the new school portrait in front of the others and put them all back into the frame. It’s a small thing in practice but it’s huge in showing my kids that they and their stories are just as important to the rest of the family as they are to themselves.

So naturally, as a photographer of mostly children, I’m a HUGE proponent of printing my work for my clients. Of course everyone wants digital files to share on social media and/or to have as back ups to the prints, but I don’t let any kids that are photographed in my studio go without a printed photograph of themselves. Even if the parents don’t have any plans to display it for whatever reason (though they always end up displaying them), I want to ensure that there’s a printed version for that kiddo to one day look back on and to hear the stories behind it.

This is also why my number one priority when photographing children is to capture their personalities as best I can. If your kiddo is going through a phase where she won’t leave the house without her favorite plastic dinosaur figure or where he loves his halloween costume so much he even sleeps in it, then I want to photograph them with their dinosaur figure and in their halloween costume. These are the memories your family is going to want to remember and share for generations. Can you imagine coming across a professional portrait of your dad at age 4, picking his nose? Or your mom at 14 dressed striking a pose in her most treasured bell-bottoms? Portraits of your kids are just as much for their future children and grandchildren as they are for you and them.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Oh that’s easy – seeing the reactions clients have when they first see the portraits I’ve created for them. For children’s portraits, it’s the immediate recognition by parents (“OMG that’s SO him!”) to the obvious overwhelming feeling of love they have for their child to the gratitude they have seeing so much genuine personality captured in one image – there are lots of laughs and lots of tears when parents first see these portraits!

With my headshot clients, I love being able to show them how the rest of the world sees them – how gorgeous they actually are. Sometimes our mirrors lie to us; lots of times our inner voices lie to us. If I can create a portrait of you that makes you gasp with joyous surprise, my day is made.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

When I first started photography, I spent a few years building my business around boudoir photography. I really wanted to be able to show women how beautiful they really are and, frankly, to show them how much behind the scenes work goes into creating those seemingly unrealistic portraits of gorgeous models we’re bombarded with everywhere we go. By pulling back that curtain, I was hoping to relieve some of the pressure women feel to fit a certain mold. But I started feeling really sad at some point. Having to constantly reassure women that they’re beautiful just the way they are, I think I became so much more aware of how prevalent body shaming and unhealthy expectations really are. I started seeing it everywhere and it just got to be too much. For my own mental health, I needed to step away from it for a while.

When I came back to photography, I decided to try photographing kids to see if it was something I could enjoy. I thought I was going to hate it, honestly. Grown ups take instruction and direction easily but toddlers? Not so much. I’m terribly impatient so I was pretty sure it’d be a disaster.

Turns out kids and I actually work well together! I’m sure there’s something that could be said about my inner child or lack of maturity or whatever, but whatever it is, it works. My photo shoots with kids are downright FUN and my face hurts from smiling when I’m going through their photos afterwards. Photographing kids, for me, is easy and never feels like work, not for a second. I never get nervous before a shoot, I never dread having to work – I look forward to these things.

Contact Info:

• Website: cindyvaldezphoto.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/cindyvaldezphoto
• Facebook: Facebook.com/cindyvaldezphoto
• Other: (813) 591-4855