I spend thousands of dollars each year on professional photography for August Moon Rise.
I book the shoot. Pack the candles. Bring the things we might need. There are invoices, schedules, and the very practical business of getting everything there in one piece.
Meanwhile, other business owners are creating images with AI for a fraction of the cost.
I understand the appeal. Running a business is expensive, and finding a way to make something beautiful with the resources you have is a familiar concern.
But I keep booking the photographer.
Part of the reason is that I love what happens when someone else looks at something I have made and sees a possibility I hadn’t.
I know these candles very well. I know their weights, their wicks, their curing times. I know which boxes they fit in. Someone with a camera brings another kind of knowledge: how the light falls across the glass, what belongs in the frame, what happens if we move that chair a few inches.
I bring my work. They bring theirs. We make something together.
That experience has value to me before a single photograph reaches the website.
One of my character strengths is appreciation of beauty and excellence. In positive psychology, character strengths are positive qualities reflected in how we think, feel, and behave. The VIA framework identifies 24, including curiosity, kindness, humour, and creativity. Appreciation of beauty and excellence involves noticing and being moved by beauty, skill, and goodness—in art, in nature, and in ordinary life.[1]
For me, that includes being interested in how something was made. Recognizing the eye, the practice, and the judgment behind it. Feeling the difference another person’s work makes to my experience of the world.
This runs through August Moon Rise. The vessels I choose. The photographs. The writing. The hope that something as ordinary as lighting a candle can be a way of noticing the life you are already in.
Beauty is part of how I pay attention.
And the arts have given me a great deal to pay attention to.
A book can leave me arguing with a character for days. A song can give shape to something I hadn’t found words for. A photograph can make me look again at a room I thought I already knew.
Sometimes art comforts me. Sometimes it challenges my interpretation, interrupts my certainty, or asks me to stay with something I don’t immediately understand. I value all of that. I want other people’s imaginations in my life. I want to encounter things I wouldn’t have thought to ask for.
Paying for photography is one way I make room for that in my business. And the photographer is part of a much larger world.
There are the people who create the spaces we rent. Someone has imagined that room, chosen the furniture, found the objects, and worked out how it all belongs together. The beautiful setting you see behind a candle is someone else’s creative work, too. Paying to use it helps them keep doing that work.
There is the record shop where I buy my records. The musicians who made the music. The people whose taste and knowledge introduce me to something I might otherwise have walked past.
Some of those things find their way into a photograph. Others become part of the life I bring to making one. What I listen to, what I read, the places I spend time, and the people I talk to all influence what I notice and what I want to create.
There is a whole world attached to these images.
When I look at the cost of a shoot, I think about where that money goes. It pays for someone’s time and skill. It helps cover the cost of maintaining a space where other people can make things. It contributes to businesses I am glad exist.
I get something from those relationships, too. A conversation. A recommendation. An idea that takes a different direction because someone else brought something to it. My world gets bigger through being involved in theirs.
There are already plenty of ways for my money to reach a billionaire I’ve never met. When I can choose to put some of it into this world instead, I want to.
I want the photographer to keep taking photographs. I want the people making beautiful spaces to be able to afford to keep the doors open. I want to walk into the record shop and discover something.
Those things have a place in the life I want to lead, so they have a place in the budget of the business I run.
And I think about that when someone buys a candle from me. Their purchase helps me pay someone else for their work. It becomes part of another booking, another project, another person getting to continue.
The photograph is one lovely thing that comes out of it. So is the chance to help keep that world going.
There is also a very practical reason.
I want you to see what is actually possible.
These photographs are styled. We choose the setting, arrange the objects, work with light, and edit the images. There is artistry involved in making a photograph feel inviting.
But the candle exists. The light touched the glass. The objects occupied the same room.
You might never arrange your home exactly this way. You might put the candle beside the television remote and yesterday’s junk mail. That’s a perfectly good place for it.
Still, I want the photograph to offer an invitation you can accept. A sense of what this object could bring to a real room, on a real evening. I want the candle that arrives at your door to feel familiar from the one that caught your eye.
An image can be aspirational and still leave room for the life it is meant to join.
There is room for technology in a creative life. I’m interested in what it makes possible. I also get to decide which experiences and relationships I want to keep investing in as it changes the options available to me.
Professional photography is one of those choices.
I enjoy the collaboration. I value the skill. I like knowing that some of the money this business earns helps another person continue making their work.
And when I share the photographs with you, I get to share something we made together.
I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to be home in your own life. For me, part of that is making room for the things that move me—and for the people who make them.
There is someone behind the beauty.
I’m glad I get to work with them.
[1] VIA Institute on Character: The 24 Character Strengths and Appreciation of Beauty & Excellence.