Today we’d like to introduce you to Christine Gosch.
Christine, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My roots are in creativity in most any form. In my childhood, I loved painting, drawing with chalk, going through disposable cameras faster than I could keep up with, creative writing, any school project that included crafting, scrapbooking, and more. My parents are both creative and so are their respective families. My mom would create jewelry, paint pots and create flower arrangements in them, garden, shoot film photography, and sew. My dad had a keen eye for great furniture and interiors, building projects, creating miniature derby cars with me and my siblings, and owned a videography company with my mom when my family lived in Louisiana.
As I grew, my creative interests evolved, and I was able to apply them to my schooling. Throughout junior high and high school, my favorite classes were photography and yearbook. In yearbook production class, my main responsibilities were writing, designing spreads, and taking relevant photos to fit within those spreads.
Fast forward a few years. When my husband and I welcomed our daughter into the world in 2009, I couldn’t get enough of her. As any parent reading this can relate, I couldn’t stop taking photos of her. As time progressed, friends and family noticed the photos I would share of my daughter and would ask if I was willing to photograph their children/ family. As with most photographers, you start where you are with what you know and grow from there. I started by photographing friends and family, and that expanded to friends of friends, and eventually, I created a family portrait photography website. From there, I started photographing weddings and happily did that for about 10 years.
As a wedding photographer, I noticed that one of my favorite things to do was to photograph the wedding day details. I loved the pretty items, and that I could take my time playing around with styling them in an attractive way and photographing them to aid in telling the story of the couple’s wedding day. I loved the florals, the bridal shoes, the wedding invitation suite, the rings, the bride’s perfume bottle, etc. I had control over the lighting scenario and the shooting timeline we photographed the details in, all things that were the complete opposite of the rest of a wedding day, where I could have no control over the pace at which I worked or the lighting in the ceremony space.
Starting around 2017, I was approached by fellow wedding vendor friends who asked me if they could pay me to photograph their wedding-related products outside of a wedding day so they could use those photos to represent their brand on their website and social media accounts. Since photographing the pretty parts of the wedding day was one of my favorite parts of my job, I was on board! After a few sessions, I realized this is absolutely what I wanted to be doing, career-wise. I traded in working on weekends, being restricted by harsh timelines and lighting situations, and anxiety-fueled/sleepless pre-wedding nights, with the freedom to control my schedule, the pace at which I prefer to work, and choosing the lighting I’m able to work in.
I’ve been photographing brands full-time since 2019, working with creative small businesses to artfully capture their products, headshots and portraits, lifestyle photos, food and drink menus, interiors, e-commerce photos, and more. We have a Houston studio space in the Memorial Park/ Washington Corridor, and we’re so grateful to our amazing clients that trust us to capture imagery for their brand.
We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
While I feel that no act of choosing to pursue creative passions as a career is without its challenges, every step of the way has felt very natural (and so worth it) when I look back at how my career has progressed. One step has always led organically to another, and taking the leap has paid off every time. Going from the child who grew up with creative parents to being able to apply my creative interests at school to refining those skills as a young parent with a new child and exercising my creativity as a form to make money, all seems to flow quite seamlessly.
As a creative, as long as you keep consistently pursuing your art form, new opportunities arise. You meet new people who introduce you to new clients, artists, spaces, and groups of people who also enjoy your art form, and you inevitably grow from there. To make your journey as an artist one of growth, I think the key is staying true to yourself and your art and consistently putting forth effort.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Lightbulb League is my Houston brand photography business, and we specialize in photographing food + drinks, headshots, interiors, branded portraits, lifestyle shots, process shots, products, and more.
Our signature service is the subscription brand photo shoot offering. We work with subscription clients (all small businesses, mostly creatives) on a recurring basis to provide fresh, on-brand photos for their marketing purposes so they have new content to share year-round. This is a need that all small businesses could utilize in some way, shape, or form.
When a client of ours goes onto Instagram to post a photo or video to their feed or story, they can just peruse through their online gallery of many high-quality, on-brand photos we’ve captured for them. We eliminate the worry of ‘where will my next custom photo/ video come from’ for our clients.
As the years have passed, we’ve not come across another Houston area photographer who shoots only brand work for creative small businesses, especially mostly on film (our favorite medium to shoot) and set up to service brands via subscription. We’ve seen plenty of wedding + portrait photographers capture brand photos for their friends and/or fellow wedding vendors arbitrarily (which is fine; like I mentioned earlier, that’s where I started)! But when it comes to utilizing our art form in an efficient and professional manner, we serve our clients with the confidence that they won’t find what we have to offer elsewhere in Houston.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lightbulbleague.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lightbulbleague
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LightbulbLeague/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/lightbulbleague
Image Credits
© Lightbulb League
