Jansen Photography was started out of a desire to do something serious with a long term passion for photography, more serious than just treating it as a hobby.
I started shooting senior photo sessions way back in 2004, and today that’s an important part of Jansen Photography. Our first wedding was in 2005, and part of the reason for starting this blog is to write about wedding and other photo gigs (along with photo samples). Some of our most enjoyable yet challenging shoots have been our weddings.
I’ll be adding some comments from Pam in these posts (or she will) as I slowly get this part of the site off the ground.
Pam, by the way, is my sister and assistant for weddings and wedding receptions. As for rest of the services JP provides, I’ve gone solo (so far). Well, mostly.
I work full time at Western Michigan University, my Alma mater, and Pam works full time at Amway Corporation (she’s a director of graphic arts in the packaging area). While I’ve done a number of photography gigs at and for WMU, my main bread and butter day job there is Associate Director of Database Administration. Ok, back office nerd manager…
So by definition we are not a full time business. But our passion for photography is full time, as evidenced by the many samples provided on this website.
Another reason for starting this blog is that the old website contained lots of samples from the non-purely portrait or wedding genre, and rather than just convert everything over, I figured it might be better to feature some things in blog form. Samples from some of these are being included in the (new) website, but for some, there’s really no place for them on the new site other than this blog. They really didn’t fit well on the old website.
Examples: I shoot in Al Sabo Land Preserve quite often, but not always for senior portraits or wedding engagements or some other type of portrait. I’ve been shooting landscapes and nature in the preserve for years, although admittedly mostly landscapes or flora. I posted a YouTube video summarizing some of these photos (with a soundtrack from Al Sabo) and some tiny movie clips, earlier this year (here). This blog would be a great medium to explore photography in Al Sabo, rather than just include a few samples on the regular website. Another example is a long term project I’ve been planning, to shoot area musicians with my own avant-garde take on them and their instruments. I’m actually quite excited about this one, I believe the results of the project may be compelling enough to create a large format photo book from. Or not. But the process will be worth it either way. And this blog is the perfect medium to write about these things in a casual style, without getting in the way of future customers just trying to find a photographer for their high school senior.
I just remembered another example…years ago I was asked to host a casual get together of folks interested in getting more serious with photography. You know, get away from automation by the camera and flash and mix all manual control with an artistic sense, you get the idea. The problem is, this died an early death due to busy schedules and the usual, life. I might resurrect some of that here. And that might be one of the few posts I would consider opening up for discussion; that is, once I install the necessary filters and spam killers to keep the junk out. What a lesson that was, when I first set this up.