Erin Little
Photo Courtesy of Erin Little
Erin Little joins me on the Makers of Maine Behind The Lens Series. I discovered Erin when she was working on the Mainers project, which shares stories and visuals of extraordinary people here in Maine. Erin joined Kristan in shooting Nick Rossi earlier this year, and she was so happy to see Erin's eyes light up as they walked through his space.
Erin tells me, “I am a photographer. I have been doing it at this point, for about 14 years and it's kind of evolved over those years. Right now I'm focusing on interior and architectural photography. But in the beginning, what inspired me, was to take it from a hobby to a more professional level. I just really fell in love with the digital world and I had been using film so everything just kind of opened up and seemed much more accessible in terms of what you could really do with the craft, it just seemed easier, it was less expensive upfront. It was just more feasible and my daughter at that point was a baby and I started kind of like a blog, which became really popular back in the blogging days, and that really kind of launched my career very quickly. So within six months, I was already shooting gigs and getting hired and you know, it was just all very serendipitous and worked out well.”
Prior to Erin's photography career, her focus was raising her beautiful daughter and crafting children's clothing. She had an online shop and blog to help her promote her pieces. She handled her own photography and people grew to love her photography work when visiting her online shop.
I had kind of an interesting college path. I was a musician growing up so that was kind of my focus. I play classical piano and jazz trumpet and classical trumpet. So I actually auditioned to get into Berklee School of Music and like, just kind of passed it up. I was in this really defiant, kind of like, everybody just assumes that I'm going to do music because I've been doing it my whole life. But what if I don't want to go to a music school, it was really scary for me to think about going to a school where you went for one thing, and it was music, you know, you didn't have any other options. If you got to, like the junior year, and you're like, well, I don't know if this is what I want to do. So I gave that up. I ended up at Simmons down in Boston and really didn't enjoy it. So I kind of went my own way and then ended up at Goddard, which is a kind of a school, this hippie school in Vermont, and did that for two years. And like kind of, it's like a home, school-based kind of you do it yourself, but you meet your advisors once a semester and all that stuff. I really love that it allowed me to work full time and go to school. Then I found my way back to music. So I ended up at USM School of Music in the jazz program for jazz trumpet performance. So absolutely no photography in any of that. But I was always taking pictures during that whole time," said Erin.
Hear more about Erin’s career journey, creative process, and what she is doing today on this episode of Makers of Maine Behind The Lens.
See Erin’s work here: http://erinlittleportfolio.com/.