Capture the very essence of a moment and immortalize it for years to come
I have been photographing for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Palm Springs, CA I would encourage my best friends into modeling for me in abandoned houses, railroad tracks, scenic backgrounds like windmills, you know the basic stuff. The desert was my life and it was all I knew. It wasn't until I left to Los Angeles that I really became exposed to a much denser population of people. I became obsessed with capturing random, natural moments instead of posing my subjects. I have always felt that there is a rawness to human emotion when people are unaware they are being observed and I fell in love with that concept so most of my work is based on natural candid moments as well as the occasional posed presentation.
I never thought I’d be doing this to pay the bills though, to be honest I have always been a bit of an introvert when it came to approaching people and I was perfectly happy just doing this as a hobby. It wasn’t until I met my husband, my polar opposite that I realized that others could take pleasure in what I did as well. He has always been a very approaching person and it was never a problem for him to make my skills known to others. He is my manager, promoter, sales person and second hand man. Kim Joya Photography would still be an idea if it weren’t for him. His go get it attitude makes the most challenging tasks seem like child’s play and his vision seems to have no end so my vision can always be concentrated on my subjects. He takes care of the business aspect of things so I only need to worry about producing the best quality work for my clients.
My favorite type of shoots are the ones where my clients come to me with a vision they have in mind. I love dissecting their ideas and making them a reality. We recently did a wedding for a couple that wanted to have a desert paradise. Being born and raised in the desert you can see how we cringe at the idea of a desert paradise as an oxymoron but we were excited to make this work for our customer. There was a beautiful desert botanical garden near us and we were able to capture these warm intimate moments between them. We were afraid that due to the desert background, there would be a lack of vibrancy to the images but the garden surroundings were able to create a beautiful complexity that could not be described with words. Our clients loved the end results and so did we. Somehow we were able to find beauty in this dry place and we learned a very valuable lesson that day on simple elegance and that is why this wedding was our favorite shoot.
