Jennifer Gillmor: capturing beauty through photography and sound.

I am ever grateful to have won the crap shoot of getting to live this life and I try to record its exquisiteness through photography and music. jengillmormusic.ca.

I have worked in journalism and done promotional photography for bands, headshots for marketing purposes and portraits for individuals and families. I have also produced artistic work and have been supported by the Ontario Arts Council.

When the digital revolution came in my early thirties, I was at a stage in my life when I needed to make a decision. As a woman chronically engaged in too many things, I choose to let go of photography as a professional endeavour and focus on music. Rather than equipping myself with a pro-digital kit, I just got a little Canon PowerShot A540. I had never owned a point-and-shoot camera and this was a happy precursor to the iPhone. Then Facebook came along and I started to see posts with photos created by Hipstamatic. The effects this app produced were so varied and beautiful that this was the reason why, though initially resistant to becoming a slave to my phone as I had seen happening all around me, I finally caved and bought an iPhone 6.

Since then, cellphone photography has become an art in its own right, with vast improvements in technology and its extreme portability and omnipresence allowing the capturing of moments that might not have had a camera present in previous times. My phone camera accompanied me on many music tours and on international travels far and wide. I had an iPhone 8 for several years when I finally bit the bullet and bought a digital Sony a7II Mirrorless Camera in 2018. Clearly, I could never abandon photography for long, if at all!