The culmination of our endless amounts of hard work and dedication to our clients and our artform has resulted in us essentially idealizing light, and from time to time, the absence of it.

Photography is largely dependent on light to reveal to us the potential for capturing beautiful images.

In some moments, it can naturally help us create intoxicatingly beautiful images, due to how light shapes our subjects in highlights, shadows, and different shades of color.

In other moments, it can provide many challenges and require us to introduce light ourselves to counteract the harshness of the sun or absence of light itself in some enclosed spaces.

This emphasis on light turns our thoughts in many different directions, and our blog is intended to be reflection of this…

What our blog is all about

Throughout our pages of content, you can expect to find some things that are virtually standard expectations across most photography websites: gear discussions, education resources, and so on.

In the same respect, you can also expect to find many things that are unexpected, such as intimate discussions of our own struggles and triumphs that have paved the road to our sustaining success.

Going further, we take this motif of light and view it in other ways, with discussions planned to delve into the philosophical and psychological for how this light we so heavily idealize guides us.

Who we are

While it may be easy enough as bloggers to distance our personal selves from our writings, it would be disingenuous to not let you have insight into us as individuals, too.

We (you can call us Jes & Chris by the way – because those are our names) bring a lot to this discussion on photography due to our backgrounds and diverse range of experiences, both within the world of photography and outside of it.

While photography is our core artistic passion that we have the privilege to express through our work, we have also learned a great deal about ourselves and the world around us as a result of taking to task our own anxieties and reservations by consistently putting ourselves in positions to embrace the unexpected and step out of our comfort zones.

With our photography business, this has been exemplified so strongly over the past several years of consistent growth, which has also come along with many trials and tribulations for us on both personal and professional levels.

We see this as a significant area where our voice can be useful to photographers interested in making this their life’s work.

Outside of this, we leverage many other skills and experiences that shape our approach to many things in life – from traveling around the world when we are able, hobbies such as music production and typography, and our combined work and educational backgrounds in psychology, graphic design, regulatory compliance, and so on…

We bring all of these things together in this blog: Formed From Light.

A blog designed with you in mind

It is here that we intend to actively help educate you on the things we have come to learn and apply to our lives in the effort to make your life better – both as a photographer and a human being.

Perhaps our words will help you to find the perfect camera lens, or even better, showcase how to use this lens effectively and apply it to your own method for photography. Further still, we hope to reveal to you the strength to push your own boundaries, and see how two fairly normal people were able to build something really special despite initial reservations.

It is a powerful thing then, this personal existence that you have the ability to take control of and shape, when you reveal that all the good things and the beautiful things in this world always need to undergo some pressure to be Formed From Light.

Our approach to content creation

Our passion for blogging stems from significant amounts of writing on an array of topics over the years, and this fire is continually fueled as we have gained a lot of positive feedback on these projects.

Between mid-2017 and mid-2018, we initially began experimenting with blogging about photography on our Hand and Arrow Photography website where we provide (and will continue to provide) educational resources both for photographers and for our clients. The reception has been quite positive since then – both in the response we’ve had in comments and messages, and in the quantifiable metrics we are able to see that showcase our content moving up in search engines and more frequently referenced by users around the world.

Our fundamental approach to creating content is to produce quality articles that are actually valuable to our readers. Often, we will spend days working on a single piece, making revisions and refining until we are satisfied that it will actually provide useful information.

We aim to provide a free resource that provides insights into a world that can often be inundated with a marketing agenda. You may even find you enjoy the way we write together – and even in the most serious of articles might find yourself having a chuckle when we interject a little bit of sarcastic humor into the mix.

In the early days of this blog, you can expect articles covering a lot of foundational topics. We do this not because we want to recreate content already out there and available, but because as Formed From Light continues to grow, we aim to be able to continually reference these foundational writings as a point of reference for both newcomers to our blog (and the world of photography), as well as seasoned photographers needing to be reminded of the fundamentals.

Transparency about our benefit and How You Can Help Us

The major inspiration for Formed From Light is to create a space separate from our main Hand and Arrow Photography website, so we can better create content for photographers, by photographers – and make this content easier to access than having to find a place for it on our primary website.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason – and anyone who runs a blog seriously should be able to tell you (if they’re being honest) that our goal is to also produce content that can enable us to generate some additional income. As professional wedding photographers, we know the pain of the “slow season,” which for us comes during the winter months.

Throughout our content, then, you will find affiliate links to products and services. These recommendations are only for those that we use and get value from.

In addition, we also occasionally will allow sponsored content or ad space on our website. We promise it won’t get too overbearing or painful, and as with affiliate links, we only accept these types of things from companies and about products we can get behind.

How you can be a part of this blog’s content

The last thing to know about Formed From Light is our desire to make content that is useful to you.

From its infancy, maintaining a direct line of communication between our readers and us is important – and the simplest way to take advantage of this and send us your thoughts for future content is through email (you can message us via our Contact Form for convenience!).

We aspire to create a sense of community as well, and you can engage with others in the comment sections of our articles, as well as through our social media pages (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest).

We hope to engage with you in many ways going forward.

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Hopefully by the end of reading all of this, you have a good sense of who we are as people, how we intend to use our blog and what kind of content we will be producing.