Kaelin Bell

Kaelin Bell took me to a place close to her heart when I asked where she wanted to take portraits. “I chose the parking structure at Horton’s Plaza because when I had my super old camera, I would go there on the trolley with a friend, and we would just stand on the parking structure at night, and she would let me take picture of her, just because I wanted to mess around with my camera,” she tells me. “And that’s kind of how I figured out that portrait photography was what I really wanted to do.

“I feel like every time I go there, it reminds me of the very first portraits I ever took, and it’s nice to just think back on that, and to look at myself now, and think about how much I’ve grown, and how much growth I still have.”

Kaelin first found solace in photography in her first few years of high school. “At a lot of points in my life, I’ve felt

like I don’t have a lot of the same skills as other people,” she tells me as we drive from the photoshoot location downtown towards her home in east county. “I was never good at sports, I could never cook, but once I figured out that I could do photography and really hone into my creative side for a living, then I finally felt that there was something that I was meant to do.”

Recently, she’s picked up on the long-time dream of music photography, but she started off small. “I would go around and take lots of pictures of my friends, and I never really thought about it as anything that was something that I could make a living out of eventually, or really consider myself to be a photographer. I would just kind of do it for fun, and then my friends would make my pictures their profile picture on Facebook or something, and it eventually just led me down a path of, okay. This is what I like to do.”

Kaelin lives in Washington State now for university, but San Diego will always hold a special place in her heart, specifically because of its DIY scene.

“Having moved away to a different area for school really made me miss a lot of the different parts of the DIY scene here that I had come to love,” she tells me. “From the graffiti on the walls, to all the local bands. Without that, it makes an area hard to differentiate from another. The DIY scene is what gives an area its soul.”

How does one come from the roots of taking portraits on top of parking structures. “Just go for it,” Kaelin suggests. “It’s really hard, especially it you’re like me, to not compare yourself to other people, but I feel like comparison is the enemy of creativity. So, just go out there, and do what you want to do, even if you are garbage at it at the beginning. The only way for you to get better is to practice.”

“The DIYsceneis whatgives anarea itssoul”

Find more of Kaelin’s photography on either of her Instagram accounts, @babykaelin and @kaelinmariephoto