Helllooooooo! Welcome to beauty and the splendor of Shoot With Personality, or at least the place where I try to showcase the beauty and splendor of the world around me.
The short of it: I am a Memphis-based photographer who shoots everything from weddings to punk bands, and all things in between.
C'est moi, Amanda!
The long of it: My name is Amanda and I’d describe myself as being “your friendly neighborhood photographer.” Shoot With Personality is the name under while I’ve been doing photography since 2002. Why “Shoot With Personality?”, you might ask. I suppose I probably should have named my website “Amanda Raney Photography” or something along those lines when I decided to register a domain back in 2002. The reason I chose that as the name of my photography website is a bit of trivia, so if you can correctly tell me what inspired the name, I’ll give you a cookie!
To tell you a little somethin’ about my history as a photographer, it goes somethin’ like this: You know when you’re a kid, and you have to write a paragraph or two about what you’d like to do when you grow up? When I was about ten years old, I decided that when I had to tell my teacher what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d write down “I want to be a writer and a photographer.” Not sure where the desire to be a photog came from; at age ten, I didn’t own a camera and didn’t know any photographers. It’s just something I got in my head way back then and the idea never really went away.
Fast forward about ten years, and I decided to more seriously explore the world of photography, at which point I bought myself a real camera. And by “real”, I mean a $50 35mm off-brand SLR camera from ebay. I pretty well devoured anything I could find at the public library which had to do with cameras and photography, and I can honestly say the internet was an awesome resource for me in those early days.
When I began to try my hand at photography, I didn’t go into it with a favored type of photography, like nature or babies. I got my feet wet by going to see my friends’ bands play hardcore/punk shows. I liked documenting the bands playing and taking snapshots of my friends while hanging out at the show. I woke up one day and realized I had evolved into something of a portrait photographer and was lovin’ it.
So here I am today, your friendly neighborhood photographer, who learned her craft by taking in the world around her via the lens of a camera. Sometimes “the world around her” is a tattooed guitarist jumping off a half-stack amp, and sometimes it’s a bride and groom on their most special day.
- Read the Shoot With Personality blog!
– View The Shoot With Personality galleries!
– Drop me a line!