Everyone sees the world through different lens, and Rachel Witenhafer catches all of the beauty in the world with her photography.
“I feel like I see a lot of things more beautifully than other people see things,” Witenhafer said. Growing up with an artist for a grandma has kept Witenhafer in the art world of keeping a perspective of everything in a unique way. She has done photography for five years and likes to capture the beauty of nature around people.
The first part of Witenhafer’s gig was wedding shoots. And although that is the business that makes the most money, she found that her passion was not about big parties with lots of people and staged photos, her passion was about capturing single, one-on-one people, in nature. The process of moving from just nature into people with nature took a few steps.
Witenhafer said, “it started with nature, cause I’ve always loved the outdoors, then I saved up money to buy a camera, then I started taking pictures of nature, and then I started taking pictures of my friends; that’s when I realized I really liked that.”
However, these aren’t just any ordinary pictures; Witenhafer enjoys to twist her photography in risky ways. She takes the photo and edits them to focus on the model and express their emotions. “I’ll get really close with the person and try to pull emotion out of them and it turns into a really intense photo,” Witenhafer said. She pulls the beauty from nature and the person and combines them into pictures to make “people go ‘woah.’”
Not only are others impressed with her work, Witenhafer herself is proud that she takes risks to be her own kind of photographer. She said, “first I was scared to be different and meet new people and do what I wanted to do, but after I’ve grown out of that I’m not afraid to just doing it.”
Witenhafer has evolved from solely focusing on the beauty of nature into driving the attention to the individual – to show their beauty. “I think everybody is beautiful in their own way, that’s why I get to know them, really remember them,” Witenhafer said. Beauty may not always be from the outside, but more importantly from within. People can look put together, spiffed up, and polished, but in reality, an individual’s personality drives the beauty which is why Witenhafer pulls emotion out of her models.