Welcome, honey!

Hi there! My name is Eva and I am the photographer, creative business owner, teacher, and workshop host behind First We Eat. Welcome, and pull up a seat!

Photography has been a lifelong love of mine—I learned photography on a film camera, dark room-style, 18 years (yep, EIGHTEEN!) ago. After college, I started shooting digital and fell completely in love with the capabilities of DSLR cameras. I've seen trends come and go, technology change, and have been there since the birth of social media (WILD times!)

I'm an enneagram type 2 wing 3, 'The Hostess' (which means I love helping + nurturing others), I have a moderate houseplant-collecting compulsion, I love gardening, my man, my dogs, my chickens, and my cat, my mother and sister are both teachers, and I love bodies of water but can't swim.

Basically—teaching is in my DNA, helping things grow brings me more joy than anything in the world, and somebody's gotta keep an eye on me at the beach.

I have a Saveur-nominated food blog, Adventures in Cooking, and have authored + photographed two cookbooks, one of which (First We Eat) was nominated by IACP for best cookbook of 2019. I’ve shot for clients as big as 7-Up, and as small as local restaurants. I’ve done takeovers on the @Instagram main feed (I still pinch myself about that one!), my work’s been featured in dozens of magazines + publications, I've taught thousands of students from every continent (except Antartica...for now!), and I work full-time doing what I love.

IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS THOUGH...

I learned how to use my DSLR on my own through YEARS of small incremental progress and frustration, back before online courses + workshops existed. The transition from film to digital was….difficult. I was doing it on the weekends of my very-stressful day job, and felt overwhelmed 99.99% of the time.

And while my business was growing more and more profitable each year, my overall happiness wasn’t on that same trajectory. After writing my cookbook, I was so burnt out and exhausted that I didn’t even feel like a human being anymore. I was trying to “do it all”, except the one thing I wasn’t doing was taking care of myself. In the year following, I made huge changes in the way I worked and ran my business, and now I work an average of 20 hours a week and make over 400k a year. And I don’t say that to brag, I say that to help convince you that you don’t need to kill yourself to run a thriving creative business. Being profitable, happy, and healthy is completely possible!

It was a year after that experience that I created Creative Business School to help other creatives grow their businesses in a sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable way.

My path was definitely a really frustrating and painful one for those first few years—but yours doesn’t have to be. 

Here’s what I want you to know that I wish I could’ve told my past self:

There is no medal for punishing yourself and doing things the hard way.

The quicker you can improve your skillset, the sooner you can start leaving your beautiful mark on the world.