Want a little background info on how I got here?

HEY HI HELLO!!! My name is Karly Payne! I got married in 2021 to my high school sweetheart, Alex, and I am an absolute sucker for a good love story. It’s what makes me fall more in love with my job every single day. My photography journey began when my oldest sister Sammie bought me my first professional camera when I was 15. (What an awesome sister, right?? Those things aren’t cheap)! I basically photographed everything at this point in my life.. literally every flower I laid my eyes on. After a few years I found a knack for photographing portraits so I continued forcing allllll of my friends to let me take photos of them. My passion was continuously growing. This led to me to getting my degree in photography at Columbia College Chicago.

At first, I had no intentions of becoming a wedding photographer. I graduated from Columbia in 2018 and worked as a studio manager for a photographer while I had my business on the side photographing portraits. During this time I had a couple old high school friends ask me to photograph their weddings and at first I was pretty hesitant because I had been a second photographer for a handful of weddings but I never had a passion for it. After photographing just my first few as a lead photographer, wow... I was HOOKED. There were such strong connections that I was able to build with my clients and it reeled me in right away.

I officially took my business full time in 2020! Yes, smack dab in the middle of a pandemic and I wouldn’t change a thing. I absolutely fell in love with photographing weddings and now here I am, photographing 25-30 weddings and 100+ portraits sessions per year! Hoping that YOU will become the next one! Now, it’s time for me to learn about YOU!! So I will be patiently waiting all the fun information you are about to fill out in your inquiry form (: