A Special Anniversary

This month is a big one. I’m celebrating five years as a business owner. Yes, you heard that right…FIVE YEARS!!! In many ways it seems like yesterday, but when I think back on all the sessions I’ve done and about the clients I’ve worked with, it seems like it’s been forever. I recently did a portrait session for a client that I had photographed within my first year of being in business. It absolutely blew my mind how the client’s two children had changed in just a few short years.

Just like my clients have grown and changed, so has my work. When I started my business I intended to focus on being a family and child photographer. In many ways, that is where the name “Fleeting Moments” came from. I thought about how fleeting the childhood years are and it made sense. I also thought that no one would remember the name “Elizabeth Gelineau” because it is hard to spell and pronounce (say “Gelato” but replace the “at” with “in” and you’ve got it…Gel-in-o). As time has gone on, I have realized that more of my clients remember me by my name rather than by my business name.

If you’ve been following me since my early days in business, you’ll recall that I said on more than one occasion that I didn’t want to photograph weddings, but that after meeting Jennie Tewell (who is now a dear friend), owner of Jennie Tewell Photography, that I fell head over heels in love with photographing weddings. It turns out weddings are one of my favorite things to photograph!

I have also had a love of food photography since that first year in business, first working with Bake My Day to photograph many of their delicious desserts. In the last two years food photography has become another huge part of my portfolio of work through the assignments I’ve done for Mobile Bay Magazine and Business Alabama Magazine. The food photography assignments led to other various editorial assignments, which have become some of my favorite experiences I’ve had with photography.

The more weddings and editorial work filled my calendar, the more the “Fleeting Moments” name started to feel like a misfit for both my business and the photography work I do as a freelance photographer. After working to establish the “Fleeting Moments Photography” name for five years, I was hesitant to make a change to it, but the more I thought and prayed about the change, the more clarity I had in my mind that it was something that needed to be done.

So that brings us to today. If you follow me on Facebook, you may have noticed a little change to the page name this morning. This is just the first step in the process of transitioning from Fleeting Moments Photography to Elizabeth Gelineau Photography, but I wanted to go ahead and assure all my lovely clients and followers of one important thing. This change in the business name is not changing the core of my business. I still love capturing fleeting moments and looking for those moments is one of my favorite parts of any shoot I do. They are and always will be at the heart of my photography. The business is changing in name only to more accurately represent the variety of work in my portfolio. Today begins the first step of that process. Wish me luck as there is a lot of work involved to make this transition complete! I’m excited to share more of this process in the months to come. 🙂

Memory Lane

2012: Christmas session with the Stallings family. They were one of my very first clients…back before I had things set up to accept credit cards. 🙂

2013: I just got to photograph these two again last fall and I can’t get over how Liam is no longer a baby and how Aymee has gone from young teenager to young lady since I took this photo.

2014: These two recently celebrated their first wedding anniversary. It’s hard to believe that they weren’t even engaged back when we did this session!

2015: The “pinch me” moment when I got to photograph Chef John Besh for a feature story in Mobile Bay Magazine. Still one of my all-time favorite shoots to be part of and still can’t believe I spent the whole day photographing a celebrity chef.

2016: One of my favorite “fleeting moments” taken during a wedding I second shot with my friend Laura Rowe, owner of Laura Rowe Photography, who took the photo of me shown at the top of this post.