Isabella and Brook-Children Portraits-Memphis, TN

I am so excited to share these photos with all of you somewhere out there!

Meet Isabella and Brook. 

I met these sweet girls and their parents through a mutual friend we have here in Memphis.  It’s truly been a blessing to get to know this family and to see how they interact and enjoy each other’s company.  It makes me excited to have a family some day.  And Brook and Isabella were so much fun to work with.  They were shy for about 10 seconds and then we just had a blast.  We walked around the park, enjoying all the trees in bloom.  At one point I think the girls thought I was taking them on a nature walk instead of a photo shoot. 

I really had a lot of fun with these girls and capturing all their fun and beautiful expressions.  These are 2 sisters that just have so much fun together. 

I loved this photo shoot for lots of reasons and one of them is because I felt like I found my niche.  I love working with kids and love working out doors surrounded by beautiful scenery.  These girls were just being themselves.  I wasn't forcing them into any super specific pose. Their expressions were their own. This is the kind of work that I would LOVE to continue to do, and maybe only do! I guess we’ll see what happens!

Hope you enjoy!

-gretchen*shaw

The Beauty in the Tales we Tell...

I’m in the process of thinking and creating this business of mine.  I’ve been wrestling through what it is I want to achieve in this business; what my goals are; what I want Gretchen Shaw Photography to look like and to be about.  And to answer these questions, I have to first answer a few more…Why do I do what I do? Why do I love photography? What’s at the root of this passion?

I often (stupidly) want to hide my faith.  I want to leave my belief in God out of the things I do.  As hard as I might try, (again, stupidly) I CANNOT leave Him out of the reason I LOVE making images.  It makes no sense in my mind without Him. 

What I love about photography is that is tells a story.  Photographs help tell hundreds and hundreds of stories!  Images also display beauty.  Images can be beautiful in obvious ways and in not so obvious ways. You can take a broken object or a beat up building and look at it in a different light, and see its beauty.  This is simply what Christ is doing in us, and what’s He’s doing in this world.  He is making it new.  He is making it beautiful.  He is and will take this broken and messed up world and redeem it.  It WILL be beautiful one day.  I and you will be perfectly beautiful one day, and I’m not just talking physically here.  That is my story.  And in this small way of taking photographs, I can look to that day through the gifts the Creator has given me.  In these hundreds and hundreds of stories happening in all these different images, there is a bigger story, a glorious story!

The image above is a photograph of a building that will very soon be torn down and will be no more.  Corpulous, a friend of mine and a better friend to my husband has lots of memories and stories tied up in this place.  This is his childhood home.  I don’t know what went on here.  I’m sure there were both good and bad memories tied up in this place.  But it was his home.  He asked me to photograph this building so that he could remember. 

I think that is beautiful. 

-gretchen*shaw

“Speak to me until I understand
Why our thinking and creating
Why our efforts of narrating
About the beauty, of the beauty
And why it matters

Like the statue in the park
Of this war torn town
And its protest of the darkness
And the chaos all around
With its beauty, how it matters
How it matters”

–sara groves