Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kaitlin Smith. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Alright, Kaitlin thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
On the photography side of my businesses I was mostly self-taught from childhood to College age. There are definitely some photos I look back on from my old point-n-shoots and laugh to myself a bit. However, at some point I asked for a higher quality point-n-shoot for a holiday, that camera became the turning point for me. I have always valued capturing a moment in time but what really sealed the career path for me was taking photos of my brothers football team in High School. I started taking photos from the stands and eventually was asked to be on the field during the games. I ended up doing that almost all four years of my brothers High School career and then a couple of his College career as well. Being on the field was something I never took for granted. It held a multitude of experiences for me that I am still grateful for to this day. Not only the opportunity to get to know photography a little better but myself as and artist and photographer. Also, to its core, what the difference is between those two things. I got to learn something that I think a lot of people struggle with, especially today with cameras being right in our pockets. There is a significant difference between capturing a moment and experiencing it. It afforded me the pleasure of learning when to just put the camera down and enjoy what was happening with your own two eye instead of through a viewfinder.
Lastly, it provided me the opportunity to share something with my brother and watch him grow up. He strongly disliked that I was on the field with him for the first few years even going as far as asking me to pretend we were not related. I respected that whole heartedly because I understood he didn’t want to feel like he was distracted. Definitely a, “keep your head in the game” scenario. Then I left for College. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time together anymore but I sure made sure my class scheduled worked out so I could drive home every weekend for his games. By the time he was a senior, and I will never forget this moment for as long as I live I would even call it a core memory, the first game of the year I was down on that football field pretending I didn’t know him like usual except this time when he passed me he said, “What’s up Kate?!” and even gave me a high five. I knew then how much he had grown up and I will always be indebted to photography for letting me experience that with him.
Taking pictures for that team solidified my decision to go to school for photography. I applied to Purdue, got in and was then accepted into the art program after my sophomore year. My life at that point was the perfect mix between photography and art. The classes I took at Purdue ranged from Black and White film photography to Photoshop. I will say that anyone really wanting to learn more about photography should take a film photography class. I am so grateful that was a freshman requirement. I use skills I learned in that classes still to this day and that was 14 years ago.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a Purdue graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Photography and Anthropology. I moved to Colorado to start my photography career immediately after graduating. I got into photography a little before high school age and wanted to be a National Geographic photographer. When visiting Breckenridge Colorado with my family one summer I met a photographer who worked for NatGeo back when cameras were only film and film rolls had 100 images each. Talking to him helped me decide I wanted to be a photographer but that art maybe played more of a roll in my photography than straight documentation (not that there can’t be art in that as well because there certainly is). As a college student I created art pieces that spoke to the side of your brain that visually attempted to figure out what you were looking at and then stimulated the opportunity for a larger conversation. I focused on animals a lot and bringing awareness to how crucial they are in our ecosystem as well as how important it is for us to help keep their habitats safe. I spent every summer in a photography internship or two. Whether with a local photographer or at a zoo, I did it all.
Since then, I have expanded to photographing families, weddings, seniors and children. I find the same joy in this that I did when I started photographing which is capturing special moments for people. Small memories and frozen moments in time for them to look back on. I believe that what sets me apart is also what I am most proud of which is my wide range of experiences as well as my pure joy in photography. There is rarely a moment, while editing, that I don’t have a smile on my face in remembrance to how much fun we all had in the moment.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Unfortunately, there are many times in my life I have had to pivot. I say unfortunately and mean it in every sense of the word as well as with humble gratitude for the experiences. One of the first major pivots of my life happened about a year after moving to Colorado. A bit of back story, I was working for a local photographer when I was offered a job with a non-profit wildlife company that would afford me more money and stability. I ended up working for that company as a lecturer for a year under unfortunately (there’s that word again) the worst management I have ever been under, to this day. Between you and me that is saving something. I was fired out of no where for literally no reason given and then fought with this company through the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment for my unemployment benefits for another six months. I used all my savings and had family supporting me from afar before I finally decided to pivot and fall back on a job in retail that I had worked during summers all through high school and college. This was the first pivot that proceeded two more major pivots that has fortunately ended in a “three lefts make a right” kind of situation. Working this retail position I was severely taken advantage of, as retail does, and was not paid enough as a manager to eat and pay my rent. At some point I had to make the decision between the two and chose rent forgoing food for close to a week. When I asked the district manager for a promotion and raise I was told I didn’t wear enough make up to work for either of those things. I knew then it was time to start looking elsewhere. I ended up moving down the hall in the mall to a department store willing to pay me $3 more an hour. This opportunity afforded me the time and opportunity for my second pivot into construction.
At this point in my life I didn’t care where I worked as long as I could afford both rent and food even if it meant basically driving from Littleton to the airport and back everyday. This was the beginning of my four years in construction. By the time I was deciding to leave the reasons were many. I missed photography and art like a piece of my soul had been slowly ripped out and stomped on. I also felt as though I was being driving mad by doing that drive everyday. And then at one point I realized that once again I was being taken advantage of and no longer being compensated for the responsibilities given to me.
I took my time finding a job I could work close to home and only 30 hours a week so I could start spending time getting my businesses up and running. I found a wonderful opportunity that I was swiftly removed from in favor of nepotism.
We have officially reach the third and final pivot back to photography and art. I felt these series of events were the universes way of telling me if was time to invest in myself and what I love. This was in February of 2020. We all know how the rest of that year went. Add in some other major life events like the continuation of being a non-essential worker, two miscarriages and then becoming a mother of a premie baby after a traumatic pregnancy, birth and then having to visit my child in the NICU for two months I think I have full rights to say I have resilience covered.
Circling back to my humble gratitude for my series of unfortunate events. My experiences with my son gave me refreshed love for crafting and a new determination to make my Etsy shop work for me. And as for all the experiences before him gave me all the motivation I needed to be my own boss and do what I love. Life is too short for all the rest.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I chose this question because I think it goes very nicely with my resilience answer. After being taken advantage of by a wide variety of jobs and management teams I lessons I have had to unlearn are many. I think the most important are: -Not knowing my worth
-making mental health sacrifices
-being to hard on myself
I have developed over time an issue with impostor syndrome. I will call my husband after a shoot and list all of the things running through my head that make me feel like I will never be able to make it as a photographer. To which he then shoots each of them down and by the end I realize how silly they all are.
I think overall the most silly lesson I have had to unlearn is, “if you are 15 minutes early you are on time, if you are on time you are late”. I call this lesson silly because it does take some common sense to unlearn/relearn what this looks like. Here’s what I mean.
I am not a perpetually late person. I actually plan ahead for everything and get to where I need to be when I need to be there. However, working a job that’s an hour away and having to drive to it during the worst traffic time frames in a big city can cause some lateness. This was something extraordinarily unacceptable to the person I was working under at the time but there were also stipulations to this for them. For instance, I had to be there 15 minutes early but I wasn’t allowed to clock in that early because they couldn’t afford overtime. If I did clock in early I couldn’t leave early because what if someone needed me in that last 15 minutes of the work day for an emergency? So I could always work less on a Friday but I had to make sure to tell them to get approval. If I clocked in two minutes late too many times I was called in to their office to discuss whether “I valued my job with them”. It was all very toxic and it took having a great manager at a different job explain to me why that behavior is toxic to really get over it. They explained that not only does it say in most handbooks that there is typically a 15 minute grace period for clock in but two minutes is not going to make or break a shift. Not only that but they also explained that their only concern is this when an employee is running late:
“Are you ok?”, “No car wreak or major life event!?” “No? Ok great are you still coming in?” “Yes? Oh wonderful I will see you when you get here.”
AND THEN if lateness is consistent the conversation looked like this, “Hey! Let’s talk about changing your hours so I am not depending on you being here at a certain time and you are stressing out about how you are going to get here on time.”
This was such a big deal to me at the time and now I see the reason was because I was so traumatized, micromanaged and manipulated that it had trickled into my everyday life well after leaving that company that I needed someone to retrain my brain to think about it differently.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/myviewpointcreations?igshid=NGVhN2U2NjQ0Yg==
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/myviewpointcreations?mibextid=nW3QTL
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaitlin-smith-17040b59/
- Other: https://myviewpointdesigns.etsy.com