Meet Jeanine

A brief introduction …

Mom – Gator Fan – Coffee Addict – Author – Photographer – Photography Mentor

Born in New York, my parents fled with me to Florida right after the Blizzard of ’78. To hear them tell this story, along with many others, the flair for drama and detail is certainly a family trait. I love telling stories – had God given me a talent for writing, that would certainly have been my career path. Instead I was blessed with an odd bag of talent tricks between math/science and art.

Growing up in a family of engineers, and being exceptionally good in math, I went to the University of Florida to study Mechanical Engineering (Go Gators!). At every given opportunity you would find me taking courses or getting involved in activities that involved design, the more creative side of engineering. After graduating, I moved to Atlanta to work for Motorola in their cellular battery division. If you owned a cellphone between 1997 and 2001, chances are you carried around a battery I designed! Pretty cool eh? One of my projects – Iridium – even ended up in the Smithsonian Museum of Air and Space! (See I told you I love to tell stories, but I digress).

While at Motorola I was lucky enough to travel all over the world. While traveling, I brought my Nikon 35mm camera and photographed everything. I wanted to be able to tell the story of my travels to friends and family back home and to create journals/scrapbooks to keep forever! I began taking photography courses in the evening to improve this new found passion of mine. It was during one of these courses that I met a photographer who would forever change my life’s journey.

I began photographing everything, everywhere I went. The instructor in that fateful photography course was a wedding photographer, and on the weekends I began working with him. This is when I realized how much I enjoyed photographing people and not just places. When I saw the joy that capturing a memory and making someone look beautiful created, I knew this is what I needed to be doing with my life. It wasn’t long after this epiphany I started conspiring on how to break out of the engineering world and into the world of photography.

In 2004 I moved back home to Florida, because Atlanta was too cold and I missed my family. I launched my photography studio in Wesley Chapel a year later and never looked back.

Today you will find me trying to juggle everything in my life: running a busy photography studio, being a mother to my amazing daughter Eryn and my toddler boy, James … keeping my house from looking like a tornado hit it, finding time to work out at the gym, stopping at Starbucks in the morning, spending too much time at Publix (I really should make better lists) … did I mention I published my first book called Don’t Blink? Oh and am now a photography mentor with the Business Success Academy! It sounds a bit crazy, but then again, I like crazy. In a weird way it keeps me sane.

As you can read, I have always believed that life is full of stories to tell and to record. Photography is my means of telling these stories. I can not wait to tell yours!