What’s in a name

As many of you have noticed, I am now operating under a new business name – my own name.  I have been known as Squishy Prints Photography for a long time now, and it is a name that will always be near and dear to my heart.  But over the course of time I have come to outgrow Squishy Prints and all that it has represented.

When I was pregnant with my first child, my husband once put his hand on my moving belly, and in his best Ellen DeGeneres Dory impression he said “I shall name him Squishy and he shall be all mine!”  Somehow that little nickname stuck, and our little boy was our Squishy for the first year of his life. During that first year of motherhood I took thousands of photos of my little Squishy and his baby friends.  I was the mommy with the camera, always snapping photos and then handing out prints to people.  I have always taken photos, and have always been a bit of a photographer – learning how to shoot manually on a film camera long before my Squishy was born.  But the combination of having a child and having a new digital camera opened up a world of possibilities, and way more shutter clicks than is logical! At some point I decided to share my love of photography with others outside my family and friends circle.  I decided to try my hand at a small business. That business needed a name.  Since most of my work started as photographs and photographic design build around my first child and his milestones, Squishy Prints Photography was born.

I have long since deleted that first free blogger website that I started with – no one needs to see my creative edits with sepia tones, selective coloring, over-sharpened eyes and fancy vignetting! Thankfully, my days of over-editing are long gone and I have gone back to clean, real images. My days of extensive props and set-ups are also long gone.  My poor second child was subjected to many experiments with bowls, lights, chairs, rugs and any other fun trendy prop that came my way.  Don’t even get me started on my knitted newborn hat collection! Oy! While I have a great collection of newborn images full of cute curled naked baby poses, I started to realize this was no longer the type of photography I wanted to do.

Squishy Prints Photography was about me mastering newborn poses, and getting families perfectly posed in good light.  It was me trying to follow posing and prop trends and trying to master these looks.  As I look back on the images I was once proud of (and truthfully am still proud of), I realize that they lack the deeper emotional connection that I seek now.

Over the last couple of years I have worked hard at rediscovering what I truly love about photography.  I have found my photographic voice and my love of story-telling through images. I have learned to see light again, and in new ways.  I have learned how to use shadows to my advantage and to really analyze a scene before I get shutter happy. I have learned to take images that have feeling.  This is an ongoing journey.  It always will be.  I have learned that this is not something that I will ever seek to master – but a long fulfilling journey that I am travelling on.

So welcome to my new journey.

I will keep www.squishyprints.com for the next little while, and I am slowly working on migrating some of my blog posts and images from that site to this one.  But the time has come for me to mature a little more, and to be a little more humble, a little more raw and a little more brave.

Welcome to Allyson Ell Photography.