hi, I'm Cheyenne

I'm a Southern California desert kid who never planned to stay in Washington. Then something about the green of it, the mountains always somewhere on the horizon, the way the seasons here make you slow down and look, made leaving feel impossible. I've been here ever since.

Photography found me before I ever held a camera. My uncle taught yearbook, and I'd sit beside him after school watching him lay out hundreds of photos of teenagers he'd never see again once June came. He treated every one like it mattered. And it did, because in a few weeks those pages would be printed and bound and passed around a cafeteria, signed in gel pen, shoved in a closet, and pulled out twenty years later by someone looking for a version of themselves they'd forgotten. I didn't have the words for it then, but that's what got me. A photograph wasn't a picture. It was a thing you could hold, and keep, and hand to someone. By the time a point-and-shoot landed in my hands in high school, I already knew what I wanted it for, and I spent the next few years shooting for the yearbook and dragging my friends into the last hour of light for their senior portraits. I photographed my first wedding six months pregnant with my daughter, and I've never turned back.

Ten years on, what keeps me behind the camera isn't the pretty pictures. It's the quiet corners of a day, the parts people think no one is watching. Nervous hands. A smile that comes and goes before anyone else catches it. Sunlight landing across a table exactly right for about forty seconds. A ridgeline or a coastline holds two people differently than a ballroom ever could, and when people feel truly seen, they open up into something you can't fake.

I'm not here to run your day, and I've never believed real can be posed. It gets earned, by giving people enough room to breathe that they forget to perform. So I'll be close when you need me and out of the way when you don't, picking up the small things no posing guide could ever anticipate. The exhale before the vows. The hand that reaches without thinking. The glance across the room that says everything. Those moments are already there. My job is to be ready for them, and to hand them back to you in photos that feel exactly the way it felt to live it.

I shoot digital and 35mm film, and film isn't a trend for me. It's how I see. There's a slowness to it. You get a limited number of frames, so every one has to mean something, and that keeps me honest. It reminds me that the whole point is paying attention.

I believe in the long way over the fast one. In road trips to nowhere and bare feet in the grass. In handwritten notes over things that come in boxes, and film grain over filters. In mountain ranges that remind you how small and how held you are at the same time. In showing up, for the people you love, for the moments that matter, for the life already happening around you.

I'd love nothing more than to show up for yours. Whether your love looks like what the world expected or not. Whether you're getting married in your backyard or halfway across the world. I'll be there, close enough to see you and far enough to let the day be yours, and I'll bring you back proof that you were loved, and that you loved someone back, on one of the biggest days of your life.