Why Work With Me

A Nikon Coolpix, then manual mode

I received a Nikon Coolpix for Christmas when I was eight years old. I have always been eager to learn exactly how things work... software, cameras, and eventually entire businesses. That little camera is where it started, and it did not take long before I wanted to challenge myself beyond a digital camera.

So at twelve, I began teaching myself manual mode on the DSLR that sat collecting dust in a closet of my childhood home. I started by photographing my family dogs and editing the photos in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. As my knowledge grew, I began photographing any event that I could find.

Keyframe by keyframe

At fourteen, I took an interest in videography and expanded my software knowledge with Sony Vegas Pro. I edited keyframe by keyframe... I have always enjoyed the nitty, gritty details that require lots of patience. I put that patience to work making promotional videos for small equine YouTubers who did not have many followers yet, so their work had a platform to be recognized on. I even mixed my own audio, so the stories filled the viewer with emotion.

My first business, then journalism

All of that practice became my first photography business at sixteen: school dances, family events, pet portraits, and more. Designing my first website for it was exciting. It also taught me some hard lessons... for example, my classmates and photography clients found a way to download my photos without paying for them.

At seventeen, I joined my school's journalism team, and that was when my graphic design skills truly began to blossom. I became the photography editor, sold and created the advertisements, and taught photography classes. It filled me with immense joy to receive nationally recognized design awards, such as Best of the High School Press from the National Scholastic Press Association.

Why people do what they do

At Ole Miss I studied psychology on a scholarship. I did not know it at the time, but that was the beginning of the work I do now. I stopped asking what a person did and started asking why they did it, and I have never been able to switch that off.

Around the same time I worked as the social media manager (and trainer) for a local dog-training business. I photographed the client dogs, ran the social media, and used my graphic design skills to create the content.

A canine behaviorist's method

Behavior work taught me not to confuse the thing I could see with the thing causing it. Over the years, working with around a thousand dogs made that distinction impossible to ignore. A dog cannot tell you what the problem is, so I had to learn to read everything around it: the environment, the routine, the body language, what happened right before the behavior and what happened right after, how it changed when one variable changed, what the owner believed was going on... and what the animal was actually showing me.

The visible behavior was not always the problem. Sometimes it was only the symptom, and the real cause sat somewhere in the environment, the sequence, or the relationship around it. Different dog, different home, different owner, different visible behavior, and the same principle underneath every one of them. The method stayed the same: observe the whole environment, find the pattern, separate the symptom from the cause, change the right variable, and watch what changes next.

That is one of the trainings I still use with businesses. An owner comes to me saying the website is the problem, or the photos, or people are not booking, or leads disappear, or customers do not come back, or we need a CRM. I do not assume the thing they named is the cause. I look around it. What is the customer seeing? What happened right before this point, and what happens next? Where does information disappear, and where does the handoff break? What is someone compensating for by hand, and what is the customer left to figure out alone? The eye came from photography and the process diagnosis came from operations, QA, and software. The habit of looking past the visible behavior came from here.

How the software gets built

So I built some. Software for pet businesses: the product, the database, the user flows, and the QA. Building it yourself teaches you something no amount of using it does. Every failure has a path, and if you follow it far enough you find the handoff that broke... usually between two pieces that were each working fine on their own.

All three at once

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing the websites around me. Businesses were paying thousands of dollars for sites that still felt generic... no story, no professional photography, nothing that felt like the actual business. Then AI made websites easier to create than ever, and so many of them began to look interchangeable. I use modern tools myself, so this is not a complaint about technology. It is an observation about what tools cannot do. They cannot understand a brand, photograph it honestly, or make someone landing on a page feel like part of the community already... and that feeling is what actually brings customers in.

More recently, I began teaching myself SEO with the same kind of curiosity I brought to photography and videography. I find it fascinating... and it matters, because generic websites rarely give search engines enough substance to work with. I will never promise rankings. I build websites with real structure, real photography, and a real story, so a business has the strongest opportunity I can reasonably give it.

Candor + Halo exists to bring those pieces together: the eye from photography, the way of watching from psychology and the animals, and the way of diagnosing from the systems.