Cecily Johnson

I photographed the annual grand production every summer for eleven years, capturing behind-the-scenes candids and staged poses after the show. Gilbert and Sullivan Austin is one of my all-time favorite non-profits!

I performed second shooter services to Whitney for over 100 weddings over nearly three years.

Giving City was an excellent publication! The attached tear sheet was from their last printed issue before going to all digital. I photographed and supplied portraits to evoke the story being told.

At SBC (later to become AT&T) I was a front end web developer that worked directly with designers on about a thousand email blasts and several site launches. The company was so large it was difficult to know when something I'd worked on was about to go live and that was strange for me, having worked for so many small companies. In the end I was an expert on the proprietary (read: ancient) email link tracking system and trying to move my department in the direction of web standards and what was then referred to as the Semantic Web. I like to feel like I was a champion for that cause, which apparently took 10 years to finally get a foothold in the industry. I dropped out of the business of web design in 2004 when I left AT&T and decided to devote myself to becoming a professional photographer.

At the time I was working at M2K, I had just graduated from UT with an art degree but had been working at startups for several years coding HTML from scratch. At M2K I was primarily a coder, but was given some UI Design opportunities, including pitching my ideas for a better user experience to a couple of clients. It was an exciting job for me, and I loved my time there.

As a fine arts student at the University of Texas, I honed my black and white photography craft. I learned to make exhibition-worthy prints in the darkroom, as well as cut mats for framing. My arts education at UT was what I would call "traditional." I learned so much, but then I did feel like I needed a supplement, which is why I followed it up with ACC.

I had the time of my life at the Department of Professional Photography at ACC! I hit the ground running with my previous knowledge of photography, but I got what I came for in the form of learning about studio lighting and using large format cameras. The department was still using film at the time, so our class did a lot of hybrid work, scanning negatives and editing the images with Photoshop. It was a great time of my life.