Hello and welcome back to middle ground. I'm Joe.

And this week's going to look a little bit different than last week's because it is our first ever solo episode.

You'll be able to catch Caroline again next

week. She's doing her first solo episode for you all then. But this week, I'm going to be talking

to you guys all about business, how I became self-employed, how I got over the fear of failure

to make the jump from a normal nine to five to being self-employed

and hopefully just tell you guys a little bit about my story and how I fell into wedding photography.

And so first I want to start with our traditional grounding moments.

For me this week, my grounding moment was just last night.

Matt and I got to enjoy the beautiful weather and we went outside and played frisbee,

which I don't know if any of you guys like to play frisbee, but I love to just throw it back

and forth and hang out in the backyard. But we discovered something when we were playing frisbee, and that is OCO, our younger dog, is terrified of the frisbee.

It's fine if we're throwing it back and forth, but if we walk up to him and have it in our hand, he will run away with everything he has. It terrifies him.

So that was kind of funny. But in general, just getting outside, spending some time away from my

phone, my computer work, spending time with my family, that definitely was my grounding moment

this week. A lot of you asked whenever I said we were doing

solo episodes for me to talk about my photography journey and how I started my business. So that's what

we're going to do. I'm going to go ahead and jump right in and get started. So I started with photography

when I was actually in middle school. I got my first point and shoot camera

when I was going to a swim meet and it was an out-of-state swim meet. I wanted to be able to capture

memories with friends. I got an open box point and shoot camera from Best Buy for like $80. I mowed the

lawn for like three or four weeks to get the money and I started

...