I think childhood follows us for much longer than we like to admit. Maybe forever, honestly.
That probably explains why I spent such a big part of my life working in education. For six years, I was a teacher, and when I moved to Ireland, I was even close to going into Early Learning and Care. That path made sense to me. But this story is about something else.
It’s about photography, and about the strange feeling that maybe I did not fully choose it. Maybe it was sitting next to me the whole time, waiting for me to catch up.
The First Camera In My Life
I do not know how normal this was in other families, but among people my age, not many grew up with parents who had a camera in the 2000s.
My mum did.
She had a Kodak KB10, a little film camera, and she photographed everything that felt worth keeping. Not just birthdays or holidays, but random small moments too. The really human ones. The kind that do not look important until years later.
What I love even more is that she archived everything carefully. We had lots of photo albums, and almost every picture had a tiny caption under it. Sometimes funny, sometimes simple, sometimes just factual. Still, every photo felt claimed. Like it mattered enough to be named.
Maybe that is also why writing attracts me. Not just images, but the urge to notice something and give it a form.
I could spend hours looking through those albums. Talking about the photos, remembering where we were, what happened before or after, what someone was wearing, what kind of mood was in the room. I think that was one of my first lessons in photography, even before I had words for it: a moment is gone very quickly, but if you catch it right, it stays alive.
The Teen Years And My First Portraits
Then technology moved on. Film cameras slowly gave way to digital ones, but the habit of taking photos stayed. My parents still kept documenting life, just in a different format now.
And honestly, I’m grateful for that, because I still have this huge archive of family photos from the early 2000s, year after year, month after month, all carefully saved and dated on a hard drive.
Then in 2012, my dad bought our first DSLR, a Canon 1100D.
That changed something.
I started taking portraits myself, mostly of people around me. Near my hometown there was a forest, and a lot of our shoots happened there. It was simple, natural, a little chaotic, and very sincere. I was not building concepts yet. I was just trying, watching, learning, seeing what happened when a person stood in the right light.
Sometimes I think that if I had been a little bolder back then, maybe I would have pushed further, tried stranger ideas, made bigger things. But at the same time, those portraits mattered. They were the beginning.
That was when I realised I loved photographing people.
What made me happiest was not even the final image itself. It was the reaction. The moment when someone saw how I saw them. We did shoots almost every month, and one day some girls from my class paid me for a session. It felt unreal. Tiny in a practical sense, maybe, but huge to me. Someone trusted my eye enough to pay for it.
That stays with you.
The Pause That Was Not Really A Pause
Later, life happened the way it usually does. University, moving, building a future, doing the “serious” things.
Photography faded into the background.
At one point I even bought an old Zenit and shot film on it for about two months before dropping it again. So technically, the interest never fully disappeared. It just kept changing shape.
The one thing that stayed with me the whole time was my phone.
For years, while I was building my academic life and trying to become a proper adult, I kept photographing everything on it. I visited more than twenty countries, and all of them ended up documented in the most unromantic but practical archive possible: Instagram.
Not as poetic as my mum’s albums, obviously. But still, I love that it all lives in one place. I still go back and scroll through those photos sometimes. They bring whole versions of me back.
So even when I was not actively “doing photography, ” I kind of still was.
The Part I Could Not Really Let Go Of
What is funny is that for around eight years, I barely touched portrait photography. And still, I always had this feeling that I saw people differently from the way they saw themselves.
Usually better, softer, more beautifully.
I notice things people stop noticing in themselves. Sometimes the exact things they dislike. A face they think is too tired. An expression they think is awkward. A feature they have looked at so many times that they only see flaw, not character.
But very often, it is not about changing the person. It is about changing the conditions. Slower pace. Better light. Fewer distractions. A little calm. A little attention.
I always loved that.
Wu Wei And The Moment Everything Clicked
When I came back to portrait photography properly, it felt almost physical. Like something opened.
My husband introduced me to Daoism, and Wu Wei really stayed with me, the idea that you do not force things before they’re ready. You wait, you feel when something opens, and then you move with it.
Around that time, I was studying photography, and my first task was to work with water. It clicked instantly. Nothing about that shoot felt dragged out or overthought. It felt like something was already moving, and I just stepped into it.
The reels from that shoot got 7 million views. I have never had that kind of success again, lol, but it made me believe I might actually be onto something.
That is what photography felt like when it came back. Not random or forced. More like a very quiet certainty.
So I bought my first personal camera and started shooting. First my husband, then models I found through social media, then people who agreed to shoot for portfolio work. Bit by bit, it grew. Not in a glamorous way, but in a real one.
Then by the beginning of 2025, I had a thought that felt both terrifying and obvious: I wanted my own mini studio.
Because having your own space matters. Especially in Ireland. Especially if you photograph people. Weather is romantic until it ruins your whole plan.
My First Studio Was Literally An Office
My first studio was not some huge dreamy loft with perfect daylight and designer furniture.
It was an office.
Before that, I was already attempting “studio shoots” in the tiny 10-square-metre place we were living in at the time. It worked in a very chaotic way, but I pretty quickly realised I needed actual space.
So the office became my first real studio. I had a two-metre black and white fabric backdrop, a cheap Chinese softbox, and extremely large ambitions.
Honestly, that setup says a lot about me.
I did not begin with perfect conditions. I began with enough. Enough space, enough light, enough hunger to make something happen.
And over time I understood that I was ready to take photography more seriously, not just as a thing I loved, but as a profession. Then, only a few month after that new start, Amelpomenem Creative Photo Studio appeared in the heart of town in Ireland.
That still feels a little surreal to write.
What Photography Means To Me Now
Since then, all kinds of people have come through my studio. Different ages, different backgrounds, different energies, different reasons for being photographed.
And me, a person who always thought of herself as an introvert, a person who was honestly scared of people in a lot of ways, somehow ended up building work that depends entirely on meeting them.
Not just meeting them, but really seeing them.
That is probably the deepest reason photography stayed with me. Portrait photography does not feel mechanical to me. It is not pressing a button. Even a passport photo, to me, is still a meeting between two people.
When someone is standing in front of you one on one, without their job title, without their usual role, without all the little shields people wear in daily life, you have to be gentle with them.
You cannot rip a person open.
You have to reveal them carefully, in a way that feels safe. Not like being hit with cold water, but like slowly stepping into cool water on a very hot day. A shock would make them close up. A slow approach lets them stay.
That is what I try to do.
And maybe that is the real answer to the question in the title. I did choose photography, yes. But I also think photography kept choosing me back, in small ways, over and over again, until I finally stopped resisting it.