Jamesville’s Kristy P. Barber has made a name for herself as one of Eastern North Carolina’s most sought after photographers courtesy of her self-titled Kristy P. Barber Photography business.
In her line of work Barber specializes in children’s photography, capturing a newborn’s earliest days and documenting that precious first year of life for their parents.
As adept as Barber is at her craft now, the art and practice that currently defines her life began innocently enough as a high school hobby.
“I started doing photography just for fun when I was in the 10th grade,” she recalls. “Back then, it was just a hobby and I would have my best friend model for me. I’d use my mother’s digital camera to take my pictures and that was about as far as it went at the time.”
She adds that her mother‘s best friend was a photographer and she was gracious enough give her a taste of what using a high quality camera was like, something that ignite a lifelong passion within her.
“My mom’s best friend was a photographer and she would let me borrow her big nice camera when she got a new one. For me, that was when it hit me that this might be something I wanted to really do,” she says.
Barber says that having a high quality camera in hand was empowering. It wasn’t long before she was, in her own words, “taking pictures of everything in sight.”
“I was taking pictures of flowers, animals, that was mainly what I did. But I got bolder, I started to branch out and asked people if I could take pictures of them,” she says. “I did that just to practice, and my love for it grew from there.”
Barber originally attended Jamesville High School for two years, but left the institution during its consolidation to join Riverside High School for the remainder of her high school career.
After graduating from Riverside in 2012, Barber attended Martin Community College, getting her associates degree in medical assisting shortly after in 2015.
For the next seven years Barber would work as a medical assistant, becoming part of different healthcare outlets, most notably working alongside Renea Price in her office in Plymouth years prior.
However, throughout all this time in the medical industry, she never fully left her first love of photography behind. As she tells it, she continued to take her pictures and grow her craft on the side, slowly but surely building up her future clientele and a solid reputation in her home town and beyond.
However as her own family grew and as she desired to spend more time with them, her desire to remain in the medical world would fade. Before long, she would fully embrace her artistry and is now one of the most sought after local photographers...