Wedding Photographer in Arkansas: Opal and June Ring Boxes!
In the summer of 2018, when our boys took their yearly summer trip to visit their grandparents in Utah, Andrew and I hopped in our car and traveled to Nashville, Atlanta, and Savannah. At the time, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind. I’d gained a lot of weight, I was super overworked, I missed my kids and, more than anything, I was just itching to make a change. It’s not that I wanted to stop shooting – if anything, I wanted to shoot more! – but I’d reached a place where I’d surpassed all the goals I could think of, had three associate wedding photographers, an assistant, and a photo editor. Things should have been really exciting – and they were really exciting! – but I wanted to do something more and I also wanted to feel more ownership of my work. My business had gone in directions that I hadn’t anticipated and, while I loved it and adored all the people I photographed and all the people I worked with, I also knew that I needed to re-route myself a bit.
As we drove across the country with a car stacked to the brim with props, wedding dresses, and luggage, I wrote outlines upon outlines. I stayed up in our Airbnb’s until four in the morning drafting business plans and crunching numbers and ideas. I talked with Andrew for hours – days! – on end about what we wanted our life together to look like, about what we wanted to achieve, and about the direction I wanted to go in with my photographs. In the end, though, it was really pretty simple: I wanted to create happiness through my photographs and I wanted to help other photographers create the feelings they wanted to create, too. After that was identified, Opal and June was officially born and my workshop outline for The Hue of You began!
Technically, Opal and June is a simple division of my photography business where I rent out props and dresses that I’ve got on hand anyway. In my heart, though, it’s so much more. As a photographer who came of age when photography was less accessible, I saw a huge gap in the market for photographers looking to build something unique and, with Opal and June, I want to give photographers these resources. When you’re new – and even advanced! – it’s really easy to fall into a rut of creating the same photographs repeatedly and, with our little rental shop, I’m really hoping to create a budget friendly space for photographers with a lot of options in one place for an enormous amount of creative freedom. What’s not to love about that?!
Nowadays, I’ve simplified my business and become more hands on with my work than ever. I no longer have an assistant or an editor and we’ve scaled way back on associate weddings, too. Every time I shoot, I try to be more deliberate and more focused on creating images that make me feel fan-freaking-tastic and I absolutely love the feeling I get when my people – both clients and friends! – love their photographs as much as I do. And these photographs of these Opal and June ring boxes? They are part of this vision as well!
If you are a photographer who is struggling to find your voice or a photographer who has just gotten overwhelmed along the way, don’t be afraid to go out there and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN. You’re going to have some bad photoshoots. You’re going to take some awful images. You’re going to cry in your car a time or two when you’ve worked so hard to plan something amazing and it just didn’t go like you envisioned. But! When you’ve clearly nailed down what you want to create, those downs are just as important as your ups and, as you grow, your voice will become clearer and stronger and louder. You’ve got this! And I’ve got it, too!
P.S. NOPE! This is not the direction I meant to take this blog post at all – I was totally going to write some frilly words about these super cute ring boxes but I couldn’t help myself. The words just spilled out!
Weddings | Engagements | Seniors | Families | Personal
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Lissa Chandler is an Arkansas wedding photographer based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the co-founder and owner of Opal and June, a styled shoot rental shop, and the creator + instructor of The Hue of You, an online (and rad!) four week editing course offered through Click Photo School.
