Kyle Hepp

January 30, 2011

Last week my plan for Monday and Tuesday was to write all the blog posts for this week so that I could leave them pre-published while I was out traveling and keep you guys entertained even if we didn’t have internet. However, I got food poisoning. That was lots of fun. But no worries, Emily to the rescue. If you’re new to the blog and/or not a very observant reader, let me spell it out for you — I link to Emily all the time because she’s one of my best friends. She also happens to be a great writer. In all the years I’ve read her blog, I think I’ve seen like, one typo. In all the years you guys have read my blog, you’ve seen at least one typo a day. At least. So enjoy this typo free post while you can.

Hey guys, Emily here. While Kyle and Seba are in Coyhaique, I have been left with the keys to the blog. I feel like a high schooler who’s found herself home alone on a Saturday night – should I be inviting you all over to Kyle’s blog for a kegger? I suppose technically I never even went to a kegger in high school, much less hosted one, and I’m not exactly in high school anymore, so maybe we should just all gather at kylehepp.com for some wine and cheese. That would probably be more appropriate.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that Kyle didn’t really mean for me to attempt to entertain you all with virtual alcohol, so let’s try something else: my take on the life of the woman behind this website. You may remember that one of Kyle’s posted goals for the past year was to work a normal human schedule. That probably sounds like a pretty normal goal to a lot of people as we try to find the elusive work-life balance, and I’m sure that it’s even more common for those who run their own businesses.

Doesn’t stop me from laughing out loud every time she mentions it though. I know a lot of people look at Kyle and Seba’s life and think they don’t have real jobs. I mean, go look at their schedule. According to that they work one day a week – two max. And in between they get to go to fun places. Hello, sign me up!

Thing is, it turns out that photos don’t edit themselves. And on top of the weddings that get blocked out on their schedule, there are photo sessions which take a couple hours each, plus client meetings so that people actually hire them, plus the travel time to all of those. And did I mention the photo editing? After all that is said and done, even though Kyle does get to set her own schedule for the most part, during busy summer wedding season I can go for weeks without seeing my friend.

Now of course, even a heavy workload doesn’t mean that one must work until 5am. Which Kyle does. The girl goes full-on obsessive artist mode when she’s editing a wedding. As a client, this is great. I loved getting our photos so quickly. As a friend, however, it makes me want to shake her while saying “you have insomnia because you have no respect for your circadian rhythms!” I’ve learned, however, that her passion for photography manifests as an inability to go to sleep at a semi-decent hour as long as there are photos to edit, and I respect her hard work and dedication to both her art and her business.

Perhaps knowing all that, you can see why I laugh whenever she vows that she’s going to start working on a schedule. She is so far from having all the free time that a lot of outsiders imagine she enjoys, and she is equally far from being able to disconnect from her work. All that excitement you hear in every post about a new couple? All true, and she’s too excited most nights for a reasonable bedtime to enter the equation.

When I started writing this, I thought I was going to end up talking about how Kyle and Seba work really hard, and I feel bad for them when people imply that they have it easy. But I just realized that my whole argument is that Kyle loves her job so much that she can’t sleep, like a little kid the night before Christmas. My point stands that there is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes into the photos that end up being posted on this blog, and that work deserves recognition, but I’m reconsidering my conclusion. I can’t really feel sorry for someone for whom going to work is up there on the excitement scale with going to Disneyland. Being a photographer may be harder work than I knew before seeing everything Kyle does, but it’s also just as fun as it sounds from an outsider’s perspective.

PS. I threw in some of my own Coyhaique pictures here so that you could imagine where Kyle was. I am clearly not a professional photographer, so apologies for lowering the general photographic standard of the blog. Please do not hold it against your usual host – she’ll be back soon.