If you attended our Conservation Showcase last year you may have seen Makenna Reid as our official event photographer; as one of our NatureMakers, she views her monthly donation as simply her “studio fee” for her on-location outdoor photography work.

Makenna grew up in Ottawa, where her mother instilled a love of the outdoors in her from an early age. Both her parents were from the east coast, though, and the family spent every summer here. “I always had really happy memories tied to Atlantic Canada,” Makenna reflects. “I knew I wanted to go east as soon as I could.” She came to Nova Scotia in 2013, planning to be here for just a year. However, Nova Scotia had other plans for her. “Once I lived here,” she explains, “I knew it wasn’t something I would ever leave. I changed my plans and fully moved here.” She built a life and family; her first son arrived in 2018, and her second followed in 2020.

She had always been interested in photography, but when her first son arrived she invested in a new camera to take pictures of him. Soon friends started asking her to take pictures of them, and before she knew it a family photography business had developed organically.

From the beginning, nature took a central role in Makenna’s approach to her business. “I think Nova Scotia is the most beautiful place in the world,” she says. “Whenever my clients ask me to recommend a location, my biggest piece of advice is to think of places that they already have a connection to. Beaches they go as a family, a hike they like to do, a place that already has memories associated with it that this photo session can build on. That has also introduced me to some new places I’ve never been to! One of the things I love the most is how diverse Nova Scotia is – there is ocean and coast, and valleys and farmlands, and the waterfalls, I could go on and on. Showcasing that has always been a big part of the story I try to tell through my images.”

“I felt that I could never create a studio that could even come close to reflecting what’s in Nova Scotia for landscapes, for pictures,” Makenna explains. “So when I started my business, it was in my business plan to find a place that gives back to Nova Scotia and nature in some way so I would feel like I was doing my part. All of my stuff is on location, I don’t pay a studio fee – so I think of my monthly donation as my studio fee.” Her business was also taking off in the thick of pandemic restrictions, when social distancing and a widespread embrace of being outdoors made outdoor photo shoots not only appealing but necessary.

She found the Nature Trust after asking a knowledgeable friend to recommend an organization to which she could make her “studio fee” donation. The “set it and forget it” nature of monthly giving appealed to her; “I’m the most forgetful person, so any time I can automate something I always try to do that,” she says. But she also recognized the value in the reliability of a monthly gift, for both the donor and the recipient: “I wanted to guarantee that it was the most helpful for you, and that I would know that portions of my session would go to the Nature Trust every month.” Makenna’s monthly contribution as one of our NatureMakers was integrated into the business from the very beginning, almost four years ago.

“I’m so thankful that I live here, and I don’t think I would have had the opportunities and grown the way I did if I lived somewhere else,” says Makenna. “We are the luckiest people in the world. At my house we have ocean on one side, a lake on the other, and we spend four or five days a week at the beach or outside exploring. I can give my kids a life here I couldn’t give them anywhere else. A lot of that is because of the landscapes, the nature, the coast. I think it’s going to be the foundation that makes my boys who they are. That’s something I’m really proud of.”