Today we’d like to introduce you to Natasha Hance and Amanda Gipson.
Natasha and Amanda, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I actually started doing photography after I lost my hearing almost 9 years ago shortly after the birth of my 4th baby (I have 5 children now). It wasn’t really a planned thing. I didn’t just decide one day I was going to be a photographer. I was working as a birth doula and prenatal/newborn massage therapist and when I very suddenly lost my hearing I was kind of lost for a while. My work depended on good communication skills and ‘listening’ to my clients even in very subtle ways (even things like sighs and how they sounded.. was it a frustrated sigh from a laboring mom or a sigh of relaxation because whatever we were doing was working). When my hearing changed, I didn’t know how to communicate with anyone anymore. My husband and I had to communicate with our lap tops and typing things out for a while and my work was immediately effected.
That happened around January(ish) of 2009 and I had very recently purchased my first DSLR to take pictures of my kids with. I started to play around with it a little more and found it to be a healing outlet for me while I was navigating my new world as hearing impaired and relearning how to ‘hear’ (I had to retrain my brain to recognize words all over again because they sounded very different now). I saw the world differently. Instead of hearing emotions like laughing or crying, I saw it. I could read body language and anticipate things differently because I had to rely on what I could see only. I wasn’t distracted with sound and sound/noise didn’t cloud what I was seeing/feeling.
My midwife who had really grown to know me through my pregnancies had been keeping up with me and my growing love of photography. She called me one day several months later after I had received my first set of hearing aids and was finally learning how to live as ‘functionally deaf’ and told me about a client of hers who was due any day and really wanted her birth photographed. I very excitedly agreed to do it and 2 days later I got the call that it was go time. This was the first birth I had been to that I was not working hands on as a doula and I remember my doula instincts/knowledge combined with my new ‘sight’ making things literally click that THIS is what I was meant to do. My experiences as a doula and working very hands on with laboring moms and now my new sight I was given not being able to hear helped me anticipate moments long before they happened. I could anticipate kisses between spouses, I could read a moms body language and expressions to nearly feel what she was thinking and I could capture that perfectly for her and I could even anticipate tears before they happened so I could be ready. I could also read emotions differently and so I knew the perfect time to capture a moment or when NOT to. I was given a gift with not being able to hear what was going on and that birth changed things for me. I remember walking out the doors of the birth center to my car and I got to my car and cried. I cried tears of finally feeling like everything I had gone through had a purpose and having an overwhelming sense of a dark shadow lifting off of me. I knew that my experiences as a doula and prenatal massage therapist were not wasted… they were needed and they were preparing me for something bigger.
That first birth is also where I got my studio name. The dad there was talking to me a little about my journey and asked me “what are you going to name your photography business”. I hadn’t really thought about it yet since I never started with the intentions of opening up a business… this is where all of that changed. He said “you should name it NHance Photography because you’re Natasha Hance… get it?” It was genius and simple. It was memorable and meaningful so NHance Photography was also born that night.
I spent the next couple of years learning everything I could to hone my new skills. I spent hours upon hours scouring the internet and bookstores trying to find answers to things. There was NOTHING out there as far as education for birth photography. Birth photography wasn’t really a ‘thing’ yet so there was definitely nobody out there teaching it. I did have a close friend who was also a doula and had been doing birth photography for a couple of years who helped point me in the right direction on things but other than that, I was on my own trying to learn photography. I already had the skills to work within a birth space which is the MOST important skill as a birth photographer.
Since birth photography wasn’t a booming thing 9 years ago, I also learned how to do portraiture and supplemented between births doing portraits. So while most birth photographers started as portrait photographers, I started as a birth photographer and added portraits.
My birth photography business grew very quickly and eventually it was time to grow and I added my partner Amanda Gipson and we started Birth Unscripted with our other partner Jamie. I have 5 kids and living life on call as a business owner and as a mom is extremely difficult and nearly impossible for any one person to do long term. A lot of birth photographers burn out in less than 5 years because of the stress of living on call. We both knew that if we wanted to continue to do what we love in a healthy way we had to make some big changes and big decisions. Amanda and I had backed each other up for a few years and knew we enjoyed working together and it’s been a great decision for both of us! We are still growing, but I’m pretty proud of what we have accomplished in such a short time.
Amanda and I now do all the portraits (maternity, newborn, family, baby) under the original studio name, NHance Photography and now do all the birth photography and films under Birth Unscripted. I needed our community to see us as US so we felt it was best to add Birth Unscripted vs keeping it under NHance Photography only.
In 2016, I went from a very small studio in Dallas to moving into a big beautiful studio in Keller. This is when we really took our partnership to the next level full time and really focused on growing Birth Unscripted. Our studio is located at Origins birth center and we also have an actual office space where we do all of our editing and a separate media room where we do movie reveals for all of our birth clients. Our movie reveals are probably my favorite part of what we do. We invite parents to come in with any friends/family or birth team that they want to invite and watch their birth film and/or slideshow for the first time on our big screen while they enjoy popcorn and treats from our popcorn bar and wine.
It has not always been an easy road, but I am super proud of where our journey has lead us and the path it is heading.
Has it been a smooth road?
It has not always been a smooth road. Some of our biggest struggles for both of us was learning how to work together as a team after working solo for so long. We had to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses and figure out how to use those together. For example, Amanda is much better at emailing and scheduling stuff than I am so we have days where I am only working on editing and she is doing a lot of the back end stuff like sending quotes, scheduling meetings or sessions and just responding to dozens of emails and messages we receive from current, past and potential clients. Sometimes we have days where one of us is at a birth and the other one is at the office editing or doing office stuff.
We also had to work together for several years before we really jumped into it because it was important to us that our styles and even how we shoot at a birth were so similar that it truly did not matter which one of us our clients got. Our work is so similar now that I can’t even tell who shot what when I’m editing. Our editing is the same too so it doesn’t matter who edits it. We have an editing query of births and portraits and we just both work through it so everything gets done. That was something that was super important to us that everything was seamless so when our clients hired Birth Unscripted they got Birth Unscripted (or NHance photography for portraits)…not an individual!
Learning to share all the business responsibilities and shape what we both knew into something that worked for the team was hard. We both had our own ways of doing things and so we had a lot of trial and error trying to find what works best for us together. We had to learn and accept that NO task is unimportant. It doesn’t matter who does what, just that it gets done. We still come across things from time to time we have to work through but that is one thing that is so great about our partnerships is that we CAN work through them.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
We are primarily birth photographers who also shoot maternity and newborn and an occasional family portrait.
We are different from others because we were the first to start working as a partnership and share call. It was very hard to get the community/clients to accept that they are not hiring any ONE of us and they would just get whoever was on call. We had to work hard to get the community and potential (and especially past) clients to see us as one. We started doing that by sharing work that had our business name on it, not who shot it or who edited it because it didn’t matter. We wanted the community to see that when they hire birth unscripted they can expect a professional and reliable birth photographer who will document their birth beautifully while navigating each unique birth space. They get more than one of us who care about their birth being documented. If one of us is sick or even out of town there is still another one available who is capable of the same level of professionalism and quality they are expecting when they hire us. The unique thing about what we do is that our clients never have to stress out about us not being available for them. When someone hires a birth photographer that is working solo they will get (hopefully) a back-up who they may have never met before if their photographer is unavailable for any reason (sick, emergency, stuck somewhere else, vacation and baby comes early/late…so many reasons).
The other thing that is different when hiring us is our movie reveals that we offer our birth clients. We invite them to come watch their film or their slideshow on the big screen with popcorn and wine. Some just come with their immediate family and we’ve also had standing room with family, friends and birth team coming to celebrate by watching the film for the first time together. It’s such a nice way to end that chapter instead of just sending a link via email. We found that when we send a link via email that sometimes moms will watch it as soon as it comes through from their cell phone while doing other things like folding laundry, cooking, taking care of kiddos and not FULLY enjoy the experience of seeing it for the first time. They will also sometimes watch it before dad is home so they don’t get to watch it together. Having a space to do these was also really important to us when we were molding our new business. It set us apart from what we were both doing individually and focused more on what we were doing as a team!
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Yes! The Dallas/Ft. worth area is such a great place for expecting parents with SO many options. Most of the hospitals and nearly all of the birth centers/midwives are not just accepting birth photographers but also encouraging it.
Contact Info:
- Address: 10345 Alta Vista Rd
Keller, tx 76244 - Website: www.birthunscripted.com
- Email: birthunscriptedtx@gmail.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Birth-Unscripted-1557223434549532/ & https://www.facebook.com/nhancephotography/
Image Credit:
All images are from Birth Unscripted & Nhance Photography
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