I DO WHAT I DO BECAUSE WE'RE MADE OF MEMORIES

MY PHILOSOPHY

Hi! I'm Elis (pronounced like Elise).


I'm a wedding, portrait, and editorial photographer living just outside Washington DC.

I've had an interest in photography for as long as I can remember. I would bring my point-and-shoot camera to school anytime I got my hands on a roll of film. I was acutely aware of the passage of time even before I could fully comprehend it, and I wanted to make sure I would remember those moments later in life. Photography was my solution to that. Still is.


But it wasn't until I stepped into a darkroom for the first time, while studying to become a journalist, that it dawned on me that photography could be my career. It would still take a few years for me to step away from the conventional path and dive headfirst into what I kept as a passion on the backburner.


When I set out to become a photographer,

my main drive was the idea of eternalizing moments.


As a child, I adored looking through my family’s photo albums. That activity taught me so much about my family and their past: images of my grandparents as young people creating a life for themselves in a new country. My parents as children, growing up in two different parts of the world. My older brother as a baby. My little sister and I playing when we were toddlers. Those are memories that either didn’t happen to me or I was too young to retain them. So photos held this MAGICAL ABILITY to infuse these moments into my brain and provide me with a better understanding of myself.


That FEELING is still what MOves my creative heart.

I wanted to stop time so that I could remember it later on.

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INSPIRATION

Dancing shadows, hazy sunsets, curtains in the breeze, streams of light through the trees, bare feet on moss, rolling fog, terraced gardens, the smell of books and the sound of rain, maps, old photographs, musical crescendos, the ocean, anything UK.

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