About Me

Hi there! I’m Teresa, a Central-Illinois based photographer who likes to take pictures of People, Places and Things. I’ve been happily married to my childhood sweetheart, Kirk, since 2002. These last two decades of watching our four children grow into thriving and successful adults has been a blur! In 2022 we were blessed with our first grandchild, and life has never been better. 

Though it wasn’t something I was formally trained to do, photography has become my life’s greatest passion. From the moment I picked up a camera, I was hooked! In the last decade, I’ve taken thousands of pictures of people, places and things. For many years, I primarily photographed wildlife and scenic views in nature, but after several requests for headshots, senior portraits and family photos I’ve started focusing more on people. 

As an introvert, wildlife has always been much easier for me to photograph. But I’ve been pushing myself outside the proverbial comfort zone to expand my skills as a portrait photographer. I’m still learning best practices for natural and artificial lighting as well as posing and other effects to elevate my work from photos to art. My editing style focuses on bold, brighter colors with saturated tones. I tend to use darker overlays on backgrounds and like to add fantasy / whimsical elements. 

My love of photography and cameras started with the discovery of a broken Kodak Instamatic camera (with flash cubes) in my dad’s armoire. I was fascinated by its mechanics and pretended it still worked. I moved on to the functioning camera in the same armoire – a Kodak 110 – and started taking real pictures – when our meager film budget allowed for it, that is. (film and processing were SO expensive back in the day!)

My favorite grandmother was the first official photographer in our family. The Polaroid OneStep she had in the 1970’s was the coolest thing I’d ever seen! The way she would quietly take pictures at family gatherings made a huge impression on me. In the 1980’s, she upgraded to the Kodak Disc, and I was motivated to buy my own camera.

With savings from part-time jobs, I picked up a point-and-shoot Kodak K40 V35 camera my senior year of high school and stepped into the role of apprentice family photographer. At college, I took a class and learned about manual photography – a true game changer that inspired me to buy my first single-lens reflex (SLR) camera from a pawn shop in the early 90’s, an Olympus OM1.

I was annoyingly stuck in the “film is the only true photography” mentality  when digital cameras started hitting the scene. I let that go when my husband gifted me a Canon Powershot, and I learned first-hand how liberating it was to shoot as many photos as a memory card would hold versus the 12 – 36 shots you get from a film roll.

From there, I upgraded to the Kodak EasyShare digital camera, which took some amazing shots but still felt limiting. I missed the control I had shooting with my old Olympus. Enter the Nikon D60 DSLR camera. After racking up a massive count of shutter clicks on this versatile camera, I upgraded to a Nikon D3300 with a Nikon 55-300mm telephoto lens. (It was with this setup that I shot my first award-winning image!)

I filled many memory cards using the Nikon D3300 but eventually felt limitation creeping in again, this time in the form of crop sensor format. Tons of research later, I settled on the Nikon D750 full frame camera and added a Tamron 300-600mm lens to really fill out my camera bag. This is the equipment I primarily use in my current travels, and I am extremely pleased with the results.