I was born in the country. Nebraska is country, right? Everyone thinks so; but my childhood was more city in the middle of country, corn and cattle around the capital of a state in love with the color red. Cornhusker red, University of Nebraska red. The 90s were good years for the color red, and after three national championships, the stadium has sold out their last (1231241232 something) home games. Even a girl like me, whose Alma Mater is a sometimes-rival, wouldn't be found wearing black and gold on Nebraska-Mizzou game days.

Even a girl like me, though, dreams bigger than Memorial Stadium's tailgates. This is why:

My parents worked in journalism, the kind of journalism that happens in newsrooms next door to their printing presses. Take your daughter to work day meant smelling the newsprint and meeting the cartoon illustrators. But that was before.

In 1992, my mother's cancer won. After, a few years after, my dad left the Lincoln Journal-Star. Took the buyout. Set up our living room with backdrops and light stands. And then, one wedding day when I was Dad's assistant, he handed me a camera, and I looked through the viewfinder and snapped a photo of bridesmaid, or rather the emotion of the bridesmaid. He showed me how to develop it, how to coax its lights, its shadows out. Alchemy with chemicals and darkness. Magic.

Then I found the other magic. A portrait of a person in a single shot. Capturing a laugh, a light, a love story. Journalism is really just the enabling of honesty, the ability to let your subjects forget about the three pounds of black plastic and glass you're pointing at them. It's lightning bugs in a jar.

So then it was, where do you find the lightning bugs?

First it was Columbia, Missouri, where Alma Mater taught me technique. New York for awhile, sleeping in a room not much more than a hallway. Omaha's World Herald next, again back to Missouri for a diploma, and on to Chicago. Then, suddenly, Thailand, where they have lightning bugs and more. Where they have fishing nets that glimmer like dewy spiderwebs in the morning light. Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar teaching a gaggle of American students photography.

Now, it's back to Chicago, where I've photographed everything from Navy Pier proposals to R. Kelly's court appearances. Where I search for the fireflies in each wedding I shoot, and wait for them to appear when shooting boudoir, or portraits, or my travels. I'm a photographer catching fireflies.