Its always been my desire in life to use my artistic talents for something that I not only enjoy, but for something that is meaningful and has the potential to affect the lives of others. I believe that everyone needs to have something in their lives that they are passionate about. Photography is my passion, and passion is what I have based this business on.
I was an artist growing up, with a mother who was a wedding photographer. My artistic talents faded as I became more involved with sports and bodybuilding. I spent years bodybuilding even changing my college studies from art to nutrition, concentrating more on how to earn a living in the health and fitness field. While in college, I got a job in the computer field to help pay some bills and the corporate world slowly roped me into taking the career path as a network engineer. I was never interested in network engineering, but in my early 20s, the money and title that the corporate world offered was hard to turn down. The negative to that was it side tracked me from following any other dreams I had of earning a living doing something I was passionate about.
I continued to bodybuild through my 20s, spending all of my free time in the gym and following an eating schedule. It wasnt until I started working with professional photographers on photo shoots for magazines that photography started to really grab my attention. I was never happy with the professional photographers that I worked with and was never happy with the photographs they were taking. So I began studying photography and lighting.
Right around that same time, my Mom had taken an interest in making the change from film to digital, so we learned together. We even worked together to get a photo that she took of me published in the 2007 issue of Natural Bodybuilding and Fitness. That is a memory that I will never forget, and one that I know she was extremely proud of. So as aches and pains slowly turned into an increasing number of injuries, from several years of pushing my body past its physical limits, I began to lose my passion for bodybuilding and nutrition. I found myself being less interested in what my workout that day was going to be, to borrowing my mom's DSLR and finding things to photograph.
It wasnt until 2010 that I finally got tired of being yelled at by my mom for stealing her camera when she needed it, and purchased my own DSLR, a Nikon D60. I spent as much time as I could studying everything there was online and in books about photography, pushing myself to consistently improve my skills in all areas, such as lighting, composition, and processing. I enjoyed almost 2 years of spending quality time with my mom, studying photography, taking pictures together, and having her as my biggest fan, always pushing me to do more and more with photography before she passed away.
My mom passed away suddenly on New Year's morning of 2012 while on vacation. A month later, after the longest 4 weeks of my life, I made the decision to take my love of photography that we shared together and turn it into a business called Cass Imaging, which I know would make her extremely proud, I just wish she was here to see it.