When I fell in love with photography | Greenville Wedding Photographer | Kendra Martin Photography

I was always the girl that took a camera to everything. I remember having a little kodak flim camera at a very early age and as I got older my parents would gift me “little bit better” cameras for Christmas or my birthday. I have a cabinet that is full of photo albums and I still have boxes of negatives!! I know I totally aged myself there but whatever!! I spent every dime I made babysitter getting the film developed from my constant use of my camera. Granted most of the photos I took were snap shots of my friends & I…  or if we were on vacation all the amazing places we saw. I grew up taking road trip vacations. Let me start off by saying they were far from luxurious … we stayed in either a tent or pop up camper and ate lots of ramen noodles and denty moore beef stew and as I got older I wasn’t the fondest of these vacation arrangements…. but now almost half a lifetime later for me… I am SOOO thankful for those vacations and for the fact that my parents made it a point for us to travel as a family & I have seen soo much of the United States… and y’all we live in a country that is beautiful!!!! If you ever get the chance to explore it… do it!!! So all of that to say I took a lot of photos on vacations and I also watched my dad with his camera get set up to get certain angles and shots…. and  somewhere in there the photography bug bit me!!

It wasn’t until I was a senior in high school that I took any classes or learned anything about photography. But gosh when I took my first black & white film class … well that right there is what did it for me. It’s what made me fall in LOVE with photography.  I already loved it but that class made that love even deeper!! The assignments and learning how the camera works and how to find light… and then taking the film into a PITCH DARK ROOM and feeding it onto this round thing (yeah I know … real technical 🙂 ) and then developing the film and then processing the film and putting the image on paper and watching it go from nothing to something… ohh geeze the smells and memories from that class are all coming back and I smile because that’s where I thought “well maybe I can do this one day”.

My mom always made it a point to take at least yearly photos at Olen Mills to document my sister and I… so when it came time for me to get senior photos taken she let me find a photographer in the Charlotte area that wasn’t just a studio photographer and y’all I LOVED IT!!! I loved getting to interact with a photographer and I asked about a billion questions of how he got into it, what he studied, was it expensive… etc etc…. At the time digital photography was just coming about so between film not being cheap and digital being crazy expensive some of his answers shot down any thoughts of me doing this thing call photography … a hobby… yes… but a career… well it would be many many years later before I even considered it!!!