Introduction: I'm Haley Carnefix, and I am a professional photographer working mostly in the Greater Denver area.
My passion for photography didn't start in a classroom. And the story of my apprenticeship isn't accompanied by the walking back the stamps in a well-worn passport. That is, my vocation isn't an accumulation of the incidental. I didn't fall into this. Rather, it has always been an extension of how I express myself. An expression of my fascination for stories and the way we tell them.
I'd been around cameras almost my whole life. But my grandfather gave me my first serious camera for my fifteenth birthday, telling me, "fifteen's a good age to receive something mechanical -- to learn what it means to be taken care of by something you take good care of."
I've always been driven by an amateur's enthusiasm and I'm never afraid to experiment, try and fail, or to ask questions of those whose talents I admire. What I've discovered is the power of a well-composed image and stories such images are capable of expressing. I've learned that, while a good photograph can come about by accident, good photography is not accidental. Rather, it is fluency, an intimacy with all the elements behind the photograph, from the mechanics of the camera to understanding the elements of great lighting; from coaxing out the unique beauty of a shooting location, to having a rapport with your subjects, your clients.
This fluid intimacy is, to me, playful. And I have come to love taking photographs in the same way I love a good horror film, to read a book by Vonnegut or Garcia Marquez, petting strange cats on the street, to bake from scratch zucchini bread, or to explain to my cat, Doug, that he is, in fact, a kitty. Playfulness comes, of course, with a certain affection for the candid and unexpected. This is why I bill myself, for lack of a better term, as a natural light photographer. I have the experience and know-how to set up compelling staged photographs, but nothing beats the story told by a photograph that captures a living breathing moment. And living and working in Denver gives me an almost incomparable palette of landscapes and locations with which to work.
This is all bluster, I suppose. But I have my heritage to back me up. My name? Carnefix. Vowel shifts aside, is derived from the Latin word for "executioner." So I'm not lying when I tell you that I take killer photographs.
It's in my blood.
