New friends and cute faces

Jon gets pretty bored sometimes while waiting for couples to come out of the temple. He’s a social fellow, as I’m sure you all know. In that situation, he tends to strike up conversations and make new friends…or at least he takes an opportunity to check out someone else’s equipment, and if he can get a card from a competitor, he likes to go home and look them up online to compare photo styles.
One day, he struck up a chat with Andrea Hanks. Andrea used to be a model, but got out of the biz just as the healthy all-American-Girl style was leaving and the Herione Chic style took over. (She’s very happy to be out of the industry.) She decided that she wanted to take pictures instead of star in them, so she picked up a camera and made friends with a very influential photographer in Seattle where she was living. This photographer took Andrea under his wing, and she learned quite a bit about how to shoot, and found that she had a good eye for composition and capturing emotions.
Andrea moved back to Salt Lake a little while ago and was trying to do what Jon does…strike up conversations with other photographers…but she found out pretty quickly that most Utah photographers are selfish and insecure. As soon as Andrea would ask anything about the way they ran their business or how they got certain pictures just right, they felt like she was asking for deep dark trade secrets and they shut down completely and shrugged her off. She was getting so frustrated and disappointed in the community, but she knew that she had a lot more to learn and she isn’t as good with reading instruction manuals, (who is?) so she wasn’t sure where to go from there. She needed a mentor, or at least a friend. All she could do was keep working and hope that sometime, someone, somewhere wouldn’t mind her questions.
WELL! Jon…teacher extraordinaire, techno geek to the stars, and lover of EVERY minscule aspect of photography?…who better to run into that day in the temple vestibule!? Andrea finally found someone who may have insecurities about his work sometimes, but who knows that he is a different photographer and if people want to hire him, they will hire him…and if they don’t want to hire him, hiding secrets from other photographers isn’t going to win him the job. There’s plenty of work to go around, people!
Since that fateful day, we’ve talked for hours on the phone with Andrea, not just about technical aspects or how to handle certain client situations, but how our toddlers are doing and what fun the dinner this month is going to be. She’s great, and we’re so excited to have such a fun, sweet, and hard working new friend. We’ve had Andrea along as second camera at some of our weddings, and she even returned the favor and hired Jon as a second camera for one of her weddings. She spent a few minutes at that event taking some fun pictures of us while we hung out. Good times!

~ by bylorena on September 11, 2008.