I feel like my blog has become a lot more personal since I’ve started my own business and I think that stems from the transition from working as a staffer doing the daily grind, to working for myself, where everything is personal. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard as a staff photographer, but now I have more time to focus on what I want to shoot and I am spending less time with my camera. My photography may not have undergone any enormous changes, but the way I’m seeing what I see has changed.

It’s more meaningful. My work and personal life have blended. I’m just documenting life, assignments or family time or long-term projects, and they’re all personal.

All that being said, this post is especially personal. It’s my family immediately following my grandfather’s funeral.

Their bicentennial farm is a place I equate with my grandfather and with seeing family. It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that this visit may have been the last one with all my family in their country home, as my grandmother may move into town and the house may be boarded up.

Something I thought of while hearing my uncle and father speak during the service, in a rural small graveyard outside of a one-room church, was how completely alike all of us Brinsons are. My Uncle Phil described my grandfather–shy, funny, even at the wrong times, a love for travel, even as hard to love– and it was startling how many of those traits described each of us. Yet, when I look at the photos of all my cousins and aunts and uncles, we couldn’t be more different. Really, that’s why families are amazing. We have these intrinsic links and while we may never have been friends in any other life, we have the same dark senses of humor and unassuming shyness. We all grieved differently in private, yet, while we were in my grandparent’s home on their farm, we were all grieving the same– Joking around and pretending to forget what had brought us all together again.

I feel like my blog has become a lot more personal since I’ve started my own business and I think that stems from the transition from working as a staffer doing the daily grind, to working for myself, where everything is personal. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard as a staff photographer, but ...