I remember the first day I was invited to play pickleball at Green Lake with my friend Rachel in September of last year. I was confused on the way because we were short of the four players needed to play a game of doubles. I soon realized that it wouldn’t just be us, but that we would be mixing up and playing with a bunch of other people who happened to be at the courts. In fact, she was playing in a higher different difficultly level than me, so I wouldn’t be paying with them at all.

One of the strangest moments was when Rachel walked in the gate. It was as if a celebrity had appeared, and people stopped playing their games to greet her. I had heard within our friend group that Rachel was “good” at pickleball, but I had no ideas she was "famous" at pickleball. With her loving personality and joyful demeanor it was obvious that people would like her, but I was surprised at the amount of people that knew her. Isn’t this just a brunch of strangers in a park?

I’ve spent the last year working as what many would call a professional photographer. I have 10 years of experience with the medium, I’ve taken hundreds of thousands of photographs, and have developed my own unique visual style. I’m an award winning* photographer who has taken professional quality photographs for a wide variety of businesses and individuals. At 26 years old, I have a business license and clients, send invoices, earn revenue, do accounting and pay taxes, and have tens of thousands of dollars in professional gear. I even have framed prints of my work hanging in my studio. I have a studio!

So why do I feel like an imposter, just pretending to be a professional?

6 months ago, I googled “How big should a photography studio be?”.

I had just moved into the largest bedroom of my 5 person Seattle house, and was looking at all the new space I had. After positioning my bed and furniture on one half of the room and positioning a clothing rack as a room divider, I was left with an empty space slightly more than 8 feet long in both directions. This was a section of my house that I could dedicate to my creative endeavors. It was at this moment that I Googled the above question.

You know how you have your best thoughts in the shower? It’s because you’re trapped in there. It’s the one time of the day where you have nothing to be urgently doing, and so you accidentally have a few moments where you’re free to just exist. If you feel boredom, there’s no option to grab your phone or strike up a conversation with someone around you. You’ve trapped yourself in a space where there’s no option for external stimulation. This is something a lot of us would normally be terrified of, but instead of it being the worst part of the day, it’s where we have our best thoughts. Weird.

24 hours ago, I found a used, decade-old Fujifilm X100 on Craigslist and picked it up from a guy in Ballard. It’s a digital rangefinder that looks and feels like an old film camera. I’ve been thinking about buying one for years, but I think today was finally the right day to get one. The camera is gaining popularity on the internet due to TikToks and YouTube videos that took off and it’s getting harder to find one each day— the latest version is reselling above its retail price. But in order to explain the full reason why, I have to tell the story of my love of photography.

I have four framed family portraits hanging in my bedroom. My uncle Jim was a photojournalist and ski instructor, and was a fantastic family documentarian. His photo of my grandparents is iconic, where my grandmother is jumping in the air to try to match the height of my very tall grandfather. In his classic self-portrait, he's holding the remote camera trigger as the cord runs out of the frame (not to even mention the beard and glasses).

Properly exposing a photograph involves setting your camera to pick up details in the brightest areas and realizing much of the image may live in the shadows. That darkness is the rock-bottom, the zero-point, from which the light stands out; it makes you lean in closer. In my moody self portrait above, I set my camera to pick up the detail on my face, and in doing so sent most of the image into complete darkness.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about social media, and for the last few years I had few good things to say about it. I couldn't find a way to engage that felt even close to genuine, and my happiest outcomes came from completely disconnecting, deleting the apps, and just living my life less publicly. Every once in a while I'd sneak back in, post a photo of myself or a video of a concert, and ultimately regret wasting anyone's time who had to spend the third of a second scrolling past it.

I stopped drinking on August 25th after a life threatening experience, if I’m being dramatic about it. The following 2 months were a mix of the emotions from the metaphorical halves of the party: longing, and gratitude.

There were plenty of experiences of longing. Learning how to confidently order a soda-water-and-bitters at the bar, hiding the label on my non-alcoholic beer in front of visiting family members to avoid questions, hosting my 25th birthday at my favorite brewery without having a sip of beer.