Meet Erin Deardorff

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Erin Deardorff. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Erin below.

Erin, thank you so much for joining us and offering your lessons and wisdom for our readers. One of the things we most admire about you is your generosity and so we’d love if you could talk to us about where you think your generosity comes from.

My pursuit of photography comes from the generosity of my grandparents and the fact that I wanted to give back to a charity just like they always did. My grandparents spent their spare time teaching English to immigrants and giving back in other ways. After my grandpa passed from Alzheimer’s, I decided to do a charity bike ride to raise funds for the terrible disease. I started a blog to share my training and experience of completing the ride and in that process discovered my true passion is photography and not writing the stories. And since then a portion of all of my sales from photography goes to charity.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I am a photographer that captures the world around us through experiencing life. I snap pictures from my feet, bike, paddleboard, skis and more. I enjoy sharing those experiences through prints for people’s homes, wearable art and various merchandise! My favorite merchandise by far is the really cool yoga mats!

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The 3 qualities that I think have helped me the most are: harnessing a passion, believing in yourself and desire to help others. For me, the desire to help others is how I grew my network, gained knowledge from others and started to believe more in myself to in turn leverage a passion. I have built a community of people around me that have now given me great knowledge and I in turn share that with others in a desire to help them on their journey. This has allowed me to believe in myself and see my business grow bit by bit.

What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?

My biggest area of growth has been believing in myself and putting myself out there. A little over a year ago I asked my first place if I could put my art work up. I was totally intimidated by it and one of my friends kept pushing me. I finally realized that if I didn’t ask then how did I expect to ever be on the walls somewhere. Since then, I have grown to have 4 ongoing spots, 2 restaurants hang temporary shows, 2 solo art shows and a few upcoming things scheduled. I have only been told no twice, and that was because they don’t hang anything on their walls anymore. So it has been well worth stepping out of my comfort zone, believing in myself and just going for it.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

Erin Deardorff of Saving Memories by Making Memories

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