A wedding is the day adventure starts for a Bride and Groom. And I am so honored to have been the photographer to capture the start to Charles and Katy’s life together as Mr. and Mrs. Roybal. Their Las Cruces wedding was absolutely stunning and as a photographer, I was so excited about the reception in a pecan orchard! There was so much time and effort that went into the preparation for this special day! I hope that Charles and Katy’s hopes and dreams for the day far surpassed their expectations!

Las Cruces, New Mexico wedding photographer. 

I so enjoyed doing a family session along the Frisco with my cousins!

Things have been a little quiet around Lyndsey Garber Photography the last few weeks. Mostly due to my newly developed ability to smell EVERYTHING and a strong attachement to the toilet.

The other day we set up a tripod and self timer to take a picture and announce to the world why I’ve been hiding out on the ranch….

Yes…we’ve got a little baby Garber arriving early December!

Please keep in mind that I will not be booking sessions November/December this year. And if you’d like to get on the books contact me soon as available dates for August-October are filling fast!

This “bookworm” senior portrait session fell together so beautifully using a few simple props that those a story without distracting from Julia!

Many of you know Jake and Sammie as the winners of this years Valentines Engagement Contest! They are such a sweet couple and Nelson and I enjoyed meeting and working with them! We had spectacular lighting for our evening shoot down along the Rio Grande! It was a joy to be able to photograph them and their darling little girl! Wishing them the best of luck!

I have had so much fun working with and photographing this beautiful couple! You can just tell when they look at each other that this is meant to be! We had a beautiful New Mexico morning for this fun engagement shoot and I am so excited to be the photographer for their upcoming Datil wedding!

I know a lot of my fans follow me for my novelty “ranch life” pictures! I am blessed to live this lifestyle and I don’t get out and take pictures near enough! Or…when I do they end up collecting dust on a backup-harddrive because I’ve got so many other irons in the fire. Something else always seems to take priority over posting the everyday stuff. (Unless you follow my iphone pictures on instagram.)

But I love ranchlife pictures. It was because of photographers and artists like David R. Stoecklein and Tim Cox that I picked up a camera, wanting to capture the ranch culture through my own eyes.

I had a bit of “cabin fever” earlier this week and got a wild hair to hop in the pickup with Nelson for the morning. We were taking a few horses to turn out and planned to bring home our little colt Shotgun, who’d been out over the winter months in the horse pasture where all the retired or just not being used horses are.

Destiny’s Senior Portrait on her grandparents ranch near Dusty NM.

Tyler Rose’s Reserve New Mexico Senior Portrait Session

While working on the design for this new website, I was looking for a particular image and while digging through my archives I stumbled across the originals to my very first,  2008, practice “themed” session that I had all but forgotten about. And lately, my every thought process has ended with “I should do a blog post about that.” Besides “Throwback Thursday” (#tbt) is so popular right now. Have to do my own! So I stayed up late one night going back through the 754 pictures from that session and pulling out the few I thought had actually been kinda good. And, I did a throwback blog!

I’ve been chewing on some thoughts the last few months that seemed to fit well with the throwback theme I had going in my head.

In the last year, so so so many times someone will come to me with their pictures or email me with questions and say “I really don’t want you to see my pictures, you intimidate me.” Or “You’re so good I’m embarrassed to ask what you think of my work.” Thats when I wonder what pictures they’ve been looking at of my work because I sure haven’t seen anything spectacular. And thats because once again, I’ve fallen into the rut of comparing myself to world famous leaders in the industry who make my stuff look like all the little piles of brownish-green stuff out in the corral. 

As photographers, it is always so good for us to take a moment and look back at where we have come from. When we get too busy comparing ourselves with the stars in the industry it gets pretty discouraging really fast. But when we compare what we were in the past to what we are NOW, it can actually be very encouraging. We photogs just need to sit down and give ourselves a little pat on the back every so often. It’s so important.

Now this is where some of you all are going to look at the pictures and say, “Those aren’t bad at all!” And you’re right. They aren’t all that bad. In fact they are pretty dang good for a girl who had a new professional camera, kit lens, shot on Auto AND shot in the middle of the day no less. Yes, I really thought “Golden Hour” had something to do with 50th wedding anniversaries.

BUT. Did you all read where I said there was 754 images? And I had to edit the heck out of these babies to get them to even half way decent! This is where I can sit down and realize, 4 years later, that I’m doing really good. I can shoot in full manual where I NAIL an image and I’m not ashamed to show people my SOOC  (Straight out of Camera. No editing)! I don’t have to take 1000 pictures and hope I have 30 to give to my clients. Whewhoo! That’s huge for me. Any of my early clients will know that anytime they asked to see a picture I’d just about faint on the spot. No one, I mean NO ONE, saw the pictures before I had transformed them from “not so good amateur picture” to “over edited but *cough* presentable picture”.

No, I’m not Jasmine Star, Kevin Kubota, Amanda Holloway or David R. Stoecklein. (Just to name a FEW who I admire.) But lately I’ve realized I don’t want to be them. I’m Lyndsey Garber. The photographer who is really a whole lot better than she was 4 years ago! Am I reaching to high to say I want to be well known in the industry? No. Each day I make mistakes. Each day I learn. One picture at a time.