Photographers - Linnea Lenkus Fine Art Portrait Studios

What I’d like to say to photographers is this: follow your path, follow your vision. You will not be happy until you do. But don’t copy other photographers. That’s not cool. That’s not your vision, but someone else’s. I never have copied other photographers and you can see where it has taken my vision by looking at my work. It is original. It is me.

I hope all of you California photographers make it to this event because I don’t think I’ll be speaking much on the photography speakers’ circuit. I really don’t like spending any evenings and mornings away from my kids. I make sure to be there every evening and morning because I unfortunately cannot be there during the weekdays.

I love photographing pregnant women and their spouses together and talking with them about their expectations of what it will be like to have a child. I love sharing my experiences. I had no clue that motherhood would change me as it has. I talk about this in my photo sessions because motherhood is bittersweet and most of us don’t expect that this little person will pull us in their direction so forcefully.

As my photographic technique has become second nature and my artistic vision has become stronger I can let go of all of that and focus on the people in front of me as unique individuals. I look for the emotion, I look for the place where they are in their lives and I try to take a very simple, genuine moment and turn it into art.

You have to be ready to perceive it, embrace it, and not prevent that moment. Most parents will say, “No, no, don’t do that,” to their children in my children’s portrait studio. But that’s when I say to the adults, “No, no, don’t hold your child back.”

My mother produced a daughter who has always made a big effort. I never realized until now that she did this because I have been too busy working hard. Not only do I work hard daily at being a good parent, but I work daily at being a good photographer. Does it work? I hope it does. All I know is that I have always been driven and happy.

To me, there is nothing more beautiful and revealing as hands that have worked hard, experienced life, and have aged and rippled. And yet, I am awed by the newness of touch, the exploraton of new life and the contrast of that with protective parenting hands.

My father loved to photograph. He owned a Busch press camera, which I inherited from him. He was a frustrated, almost aspiring photographer. He supported our family instead. His love of photography was passed down to me along with many 4×5 negatives of my family. He gave me my first Kodak Instamatic camera which I keep at my Pasadena photo studio to remind me of where I started.

Do you see why I am walking on air? I am living a beautiful dream. My beautiful babies are here, present in this world and blossoming before me. I am, also, privy to special lives of twins at my portrait studios, re-experiencing my own twins’ newborn stage through the twins photography I create at my studio.

Photographers: Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. - Oscar Wilde