Click. As I emerged from the womb and took my first breath, there was the camera snapping away. From that day on my dad never stopped taking pictures of me, my brother, and everything that crossed his path. We traveled all over the world, waiting for him to capture the perfect picture. We never blew out the candles on a cake, unwrapped a package, graduated, danced, or played sports without every moment being documented. The camera was, and still is, his love.

His obsession was contagious. I was hooked. I didn't feel comfortable in front of the camera, but like my dad, I felt at home behind it.

My first camera was a flat yellow cabbage patch point-and-shoot that used real bulbs as a flash. After 8 photos or so, I would have to replace the flash. When I started taking photography in high school, I acquired the Konica my dad received on the first father's day after I was born. It was an old SLR, everything manual. I loved it, and I loved being in the dark room. From behind the lens I could catch life's little moments and frame up the strange and beautiful. The dark room was a solitary time to create and wait anxiously to see what would appear on the emulsion.

When my parents seemed sure I had inherited the photobug from my dad, they bought me my first Nikon SLR, an N70. Although, I didn't go to college for photography, as I had hoped to double major in photography and journalism, I continued to shoot throughout college. Emerson, the school with the dual programs, was far too expensive. My Parents, afraid I was destined to be a starving artist, wanted to make sure that I wouldn't have any school loans. My mother's exact quote: "If you want to be a starving artist, why add more debt?" So I attended the University of Maryland, which had no photography program. I pushed my dreams of being a photojournalist to the side, keeping photography as a hobby, and always cherishing my moments taking pictures.

I graduated college and started working for the alternative paper in Boston, MA. It was there that I got back in the groove of photography. As my mother had suspected, I was living the life of a starving artist, so to make some extra money, I started photographing parties for Stuff@Night.

The ex- party girl in me took all of her energy and committed it to her camera. I became a responsible party girl, busily jamming my calendar with photo assignments every hour of the day, be it 6am or 11pm. And as fate would have it, a job that started out as a "second job," became my primary agenda. With the camera back in my hands, I felt at peace.

As Stuff@Night's photographer, I quickly found myself emerged in the shoebox, I call Boston's social scene. Giving me opportunities to talk and photograph tons and tons of people. Giving me the connections I needed to spread out on my own, doing events for large groups, Web sites, and other papers. All the while, attending classes at NESOP to expand upon my photography skills.

But while photographing events is and has been a blast, it is the documentation of real life that gets my blood going. I leaped from events, to shooting food, concerts, and interiors for Phoenix reviews and advertisements. From there, I began doing documenting speeches and all kinds of events for other papers.

For now, I'm getting to know Massachusetts and the people in it, but one day, the dream is to travel the world with only my camera, pen, and paper [although with today's technology, that's more like: camera, charger, laptop, external hard drive, memory cards, etc] - exposing the bad in the world and reminding people of the beauty in the world.

As they say, "a picture is worth a thousand words."