Photography has been a part of my life for nearly as long as I can remember.  My first camera was a little 110mm Kodak Ektralite.  My memory says I bought it using a combination of money I earned from selling pecans and Quality Stamps, but I was  probably 9 or 10 years old, so who can say how I got it.  What's important is that I got it and fell in love with taking photos.  From that first little boxy "point and shoot" Kodak, I've had a series of cameras.  In high school I had my first lesson in exposure and composition.  In college I was the sports photographer for the yearbook.  That is when I learned to develop black and white images.  When my babies were little, I bought my first DSLR and my world of photography open up wide.
Some of my earliest memories are of pouring over photo albums.  Photography, at it's core, is story-telling, so those albums were storybooks and the characters were my family.  Some photos were only a few years removed and some dated back more than a century. Faith...Love...Service. These are just some of the gifts given to me as those old pictures came to life through the memories they awoke.  They revealed my heritage.