I got my hands on a camera at a very young age. When I was just seven years old, I was toting my Nikon everywhere—school field trips, family vacations, and anywhere else my curiosity took me—photographing whatever caught my eye. I would make scrapbooks for my dad and me to showcase the memories we had made together. But my favorite subject was always animals.

My cats were the first victims of my obsession and were often subjected to my small hands shoving a camera in their faces. I loved putting their photos into tiny albums, decorating them with stickers that said things like “kitty, kitty, kitty” or “meow!” The photos were far from impressive, but to my innocent mind, that didn’t matter. I had simply fallen in love with the idea of capturing a moment in time and making it mine to keep forever.

A few years later, this passion for photography naturally blended with my love for horses. My dad gifted me my first horse, and he quickly became the next subject in my scrapbooks—and what a captivating subject he was.

From that point on, all I wanted to do was photograph horses. While I find joy in many types of photography, horses were always the subjects I felt most drawn to. This excitement grew even more when I joined the equine community on Instagram in 2012. I was inspired by so many talented photographers and formed friendships with people from all over the world—many of whom I still talk to today.

I was fortunate enough to be given incredible opportunities by my dad to photograph horses in a wide range of environments, from Grand Prix jump-offs to wild horses in the mountains of Colorado and Utah.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end. In 2020, I lost my dad to leukemia. He was my only close family member, and life as I knew it changed completely. I was grateful to be able to keep my horses when I went to college the following year; however, it took me a long time to accept the loss of the most important person in my life. I deleted my Instagram account of 35,000 followers because it was unbearable to see so many memories of our life all at once. To this day, I still regret that decision, but I try to give myself grace and understand the mindset I was in at the time.

Fast forward four years, and I am graduating from Texas A&M University. By this point, I had almost completely given up on my dream of becoming a photographer—the one career I had once planned my entire life around. Thankfully, that spark was reignited, and through opportunities presented to me my close friends, I was able to experience the rush of equine photography once again.

The feeling of looking down at your camera and seeing a perfectly timed shot is impossible to replicate. The best equine photographers capture the essence of what a horse represents: freedom, power, and resilience—everything we, as human beings, strive to feel within ourselves. My goal as an equine photographer is to be one of those artists who can make their audience pause in this fast-paced world and feel inspired by the spirit of the horse.