This a platform to showcase all my other lines of work that follow from my main passion of landscape photography. I'm Hannah May, a 21-year-old, disaster management student with a constant itch to see the world and capture it all on camera! I have been interested in photography from a very young age. When I gave up dancing full time to go to uni, I found I needed another creative outlet to stop my
self from going stir crazy from the volume of work I had suddenly found myself under, so I started to hone my craft. My main passion is travel photography. I take a lot of inspiration from online creators like Ben Brown, Jack Morris, Chris Burkard and Alexandra Taylor. However, the problem with travel photography is the need for a constant cash flow. As a student, I travel whenever I can right now. I'm currently on a gap year working primarily voluntarily at a climate change charity in Cardiff called 'Size of Wales'. I love my job, and the work I have been able to produce in my short time there I believe will be fundamental to the success of my future post degree. However, the money doesn't flow for a free for all globe-trotting gallivant. You best believe I'm trying though! Any trip I am fortunate to take at the moment is used as another photography experiment. Many people say to put down the camera and enjoy the beauty you've found yourself in. For me personally, photography has allowed me to appreciate the beautiful planet we live on so much more than I had before. I take my time taking pictures, I work hard to capture the feeling of the location I am in so when I look at a picture later I can imagine what it was like to breathe the air there. I like to capture movement and life in my images for the same reasons. (This can be in the forms of moving people, rivers, waving flags or simply snow on a mountain.)
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The Girl Wander Brand and Starting to Make Money
I have used this time off at home away from uni and (most) work to really form my 'brand' of photography. Girl Wander was born in January of 2017 and with that came many of my friends asking if I could take photos of them for their special events. (proms, dance shows, uni projects) From this, I started for the first time to make money from something I love to do. This new way of forming an income has taught me so much more about the photography of people. This sounds ridiculous but for a really long time, I struggled to capture the person behind an image in the way I captured the feeling of a location on a landscape shoot. I now, with the help of the contacts in the dance industry I spent so much time in, have regular photo shoots with creative professionals to enhance their portfolios or prepare them for jobs. This Summer, I am really looking forward to photographing my friend's weddings. It will be my first time at a wedding full stop and I can't wait to capture the feeling of the day for both sets of bride and grooms. Check out the photography bookings and testimonial section to find out more about the headshot sessions I run.
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Cinematography
I have always filmed. I have broken family laptops over the years with the number of videos I crammed onto the little storage a laptop holds. I started to learn how to edit way back when, in my dancing days when I had to pull music together for teams I was teaching. Editing music gave me the skills to use an editing programme and taught me a bit of the lingo and I was slowly asked more and more to edit the footage that had been taking of rehearsals. My editing skills are still very much sub-par compared to the likes of any big travel vlogger on youtube, however, the main reason I now believe I'm struggling is simply down to resources. I know my way around what is and isn't a good shot, however, I use a windows laptop and the editing software is fairly out of date so the vision I often have for my videos is sometimes not what the end result can be. This was a large reason I just made compilation videos for my time in Australia. Creating these visual stories I had dreamed of when taking a lot of these shots kind of fell flat when I couldn't use the presets I wanted or transitions I thought would pull it all together. Despite this ongoing struggle for better equipment, I feel the videos I have been producing, especially in collaboration with Liz Kamille Dance (My first non-travel editing project) have been really successful. With nearly 10,000 combined views something that started out as a 'why the heck not' project has turned into something awesome. Check out the cinematography section of the website to see all the projects I have been involved with.
