Working as a Photographer in Boone, North Carolina--Jessica Maceda

Interview with Jessica Maceda conducted by Willard Watson and Ashley Warren at Center 45 Climbing Gym, for the Blowing Rock Art and History Museum, Blowing Rock, North Carolina, in conjunction with the Smithsonian traveling exhibition "The Way We Worked."

What do you do for a living?
"I am a wedding photographer here in the High Country. Mostly focusing on destination weddings and I also shoot families that are coming up here to visit as well as local families. So I mostly focus on photography full How long have to worked there? I’ve been doing photography full-time since 2010, after I got laid off from my office job here in Boone. I decided I didn’t want to go work for anyone else and start all over again at seven or eight dollars an hour. So I just decided to take the leap and do what I’ve always been most passionate about, which is photography.

And I started photography when I was young, I took classes as a teenager in middle school and high school. That was after my dad gave me my first camera when I was a teenager. It’s kinda just something I’ve done since I was young. How did you decide on your career? When I first moved up to Boone in 2005, my 35 mm camera came with me everywhere. It was still the same camera I used since I was a teenager. I really just took pictures of climbers and landscapes and I got into hiking and I had never really been much of an outdoorsy person before I moved to Boone but once I got here it’s all I really wanted to do so my camera was just always with me during that time. So I started more so focusing on landscapes, and I entered contests, like the Appalachian Mountain Photography Competition, I won that a few different times, then I became a judge on that.

Then after a while I kind of realized that I didn’t really get as much joy from taking pictures of just landscapes. So I started focusing on photographing people. I love interacting and connecting with people so that came easily to me once I started photographing humans. (laughs) I started doing families and babies, focusing in those areas..."

Read the full transcript below.

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