get to know lindsey
LC Photostyle started in 2021 as a way to make sense of a new chapter, a way to keep looking closely at the world with a six-month-old on my hip. It's grown into a full-time practice since, but my instinct hasn't changed: say yes, pay attention, keep the camera out of the way.
I don't shoot one kind of subject. Products, restaurants, construction sites, portraits, gallery openings, weddings. If there's light worth chasing, I'm probably already pulling the car over for it.
Intentional Artistry
Say yes - If it can be photographed, I want to.
The Long Version
EVANSVILLE, INDIANA
I picked up a camera for the first time as a senior in high school, in 2008, for an independent study class. I loved it immediately but had almost nothing to say with it yet. I won a couple of awards, and there are still a few photos from that year I'd stand behind today, but I was eighteen. I put the camera down and didn't pick it back up with any real intention for years.
I kept an old DSLR someone had gifted me through most of that stretch, mostly untouched, and shot my phone instead. A sales job sent me on a three-month stint near Denver, a placement I'd specifically asked for, and the mountains did exactly what I hoped they would. All I wanted to do was drive somewhere and take photos, even though I only used my trusty ol iPhone.
Then the job told me I was moving again, to either West Texas or New Hampshire. I picked West Texas, not because I wanted it, but because my sister was already there and I couldn't picture myself somewhere I'd never set foot. My mom is from West Texas. I'd spent childhood summers there. I knew exactly what I was walking into, and I knew I wasn't going to like it.
Right after the reassignment came through, my cousins took me up to Beaver Creek for the Fourth of July. On the way down the mountain, my aunt took us on a detour to the casino in Blackhawk. I won twelve hundred dollars on a slot machine, and the next day I drove to Sam's Club and bought a real camera. Armed with a cropped sensor Canon with a kit lens, I moved to Abilene.
I lived there almost exactly a year, and it still feels longer than that in my memory. My sister was close by (a few floors down actually) and genuinely saved me, even as she was getting engaged and moving into a different chapter of her own life, which somehow made us closer instead of pulling us apart. My job had me driving 3-4 hours, three or four times a week, selling infant nutrition to hospitals across three different towns during an oil boom. I hated almost it all, and I was very emotional in the insta captions about it.
What I did let myself do was time my sales calls so I'd be driving home during the sunset, so I could pull over at whatever abandoned building happened to be off the highway and shoot until the light was gone. At night I walked the quiet streets of a town I didn't love, photographing nothing in particular, just documenting the nothing, with music in my ears. I was lonely in a way I didn't have many other outlets for. The camera was the outlet.
At my sister's wedding, my cousin, Tiffany, pulled me aside and told me, if you're miserable, just come live with me in Colorado while you figure out what's next. So I did exactly that. I gave notice a few weeks later, lost a fair amount of money walking away from my job, and felt better than I had in a year.
I moved in with my cousin in Loveland, and her younger sister, Taylor, a luxury wedding planner working the Vail Valley, needed help immediately. I jumped in as her assistant, and a whole world opened up that I didn't know I'd been looking for. That was 2015. What started as assisting turned into five years inside events and design, weddings first, then styling and production more broadly, and by the end of it I was the Events Curation Director at a nationally recognized event design company in Denver. I assumed it would be my career for good.
Then COVID happened. We'd already cancelled our wedding to keep our families safe and eloped instead, and the week after that, I was laid off and the company shut its doors.
I spent the next few months in the same fog everyone else was in at that time. Somewhere in there, unexpectedly, I got pregnant, and through that pregnancy I did what I've always done when I don't know what else to do: I picked the camera back up. I had a small cottage bakery at the time and started photographing what I baked, which is how I found food photography. My cousins asked me to shoot their new online shop, which is how I found product work and styling. At the time, my only goal was to survive a sickness-laden pregnancy and didn't think much about the future of my photography "hobby."
My son, Archer, was born in April of 2021. LC Photostyle followed six months later in October, due to the constant encouragement from my husband and word of mouth clients. I called it LC Photostyle because I will always cling to the nickname my grandfather gave me (LC) and it was the only Instagram handle available that sort of made sense. Photography became more than an outlet, it was something new I had to learn. Apparently you can't run a business on vibes and winging it, so I learned the technical ins and outs of the camera, practiced my composition and editing, and embraced filling my brain with creative thoughts while I was learning how to be a mom.
In July of 2024, my husband got a job offer that would bring us to Bozeman, his hometown, where he'd gone to college (FTGGCG). Moving meant leaving my parents and my sister and her family behind, which was by far the hardest part of the decision. We ultimately decided it would be good for the three of us, and we moved that September. When Jon initially asked how I felt about it, I told him I wasn't worried about my business, I could figure it out again. But enough things fell into place that it felt like the stars lining up, and my gut said yes anyway.
I've been lucky here. A network of friends and clients has supported this business since the week I landed, and it was my friends, specifically, who pushed me out of my comfort zone and believed I could shoot portraits before I believed it myself. The small business community in Bozeman is the reason I've been able to rebuild this, basically from scratch, in two years.
When we first got here, I felt under pressure to niche down, because that's supposedly what successful photographers do, and that's where I was in my career back in the Colorado market, trying to fit in where I could. Two years here in Bozeman, and I don't feel that pressure anymore, all thanks to the community we've found. The exciting projects keep coming, different every time, and I don't want to turn one down just because I've decided I'm only a portrait photographer, or only an interiors photographer, or only anything. I want to keep doing all of it.
If you've read this far, thank you!
