It's Time For A Change at the Studio
Embracing Authenticity: How Stonetree Creative Is Changing
I want to be real with you about something.
For the past few years I’ve felt stuck. Stuck in place, stuck in business, stuck in a version of Stonetree Creative that looked right from the outside but never quite felt right from the inside. I talked to therapists, read the books, went to the workshops, hired coaches, bought more courses. I worked more, tried more, pushed harder.
And I burned out.
It wasn’t the first time. Back around 2010 I burned out from a corporate career in high tech and consulting. I recognized the signs because I’d lived them before. Trouble sleeping. Weight gain. Isolation from the people I cared about. Loss of motivation. Loss of joy. The financial results weren’t there either, which is its own particular kind of exhausting when you’re running a solo business and every dollar matters.
The biggest red flag for me was the joy. When that goes quiet, everything else is just noise.
What I figured out
I have a mantra I come back to regularly: what you don’t change, you choose. At some point I had to sit with the uncomfortable truth that I was choosing to be miserable, not because I wanted to be, but because I kept doing what I thought I was supposed to do instead of what I actually wanted to do.
I was chasing the version of a photography business that seemed like it should work here in a small town in Maine. I was shooting work that didn’t light me up because I thought it was what the market wanted. I was pretending to be in business rather than showing up as myself.
Here’s the thing. I love photography. I love making portraits of interesting people. That part was never the problem. The problem was that I was never fully in alignment with what the business was doing and who it was serving. I was spending my energy maintaining a version of Stonetree Creative that didn’t actually reflect what I believe or how I want to work.
So I made a choice to change it.
Where Stonetree Creative is headed
Going forward the work is centering on authentic simplicity. Connected, soulful portraits. Headshots and personal branding work that actually means something to the people who book it.
What that looks like in practice: fewer fine art and commercial shoots, more focus on the kind of portrait work where real connection happens in the room. The sessions that produce images people keep for decades, not just post on LinkedIn for a quarter. The work that makes someone look at a photograph of themselves and see something they hadn’t seen before.
I’ve also restructured how the studio operates. Shooting days are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Same-day reveal and ordering sessions are now available, which means you see your images and make your selections the same day you shoot rather than waiting weeks. Hair and makeup is available as an add-on for any session.
None of these changes are about doing less. They’re about doing more of the right things.
Why I’m telling you this
Because I think a lot of people understand what it feels like to be good at something and still feel like you’re operating at half capacity. Like there’s a version of the work you could be doing that would feel completely different from the version you’re currently doing.
For me, the shift was deciding that I would rather build a smaller, more intentional business around work I genuinely believe in than keep scaling something that drains me. That decision has already changed how I show up in the studio, how I talk about the work, and what the sessions themselves feel like.
The upside for clients is simple. You get a more connected experience with a photographer who is fully present and genuinely invested in what we’re making together.
That’s what Stonetree Creative is built for now.
