Anna Jones of Anna Jones | Art of Photography. Photo by Eric Rowley/Juice.
Anna Jones’ view of the Des Moines startup community comes from a unique perspective: behind a camera lens.
Jones operates her business, Anna Jones | Art of Photography, from Des Moines full-time, documenting everything from babies to weddings to commercial projects. As of December, she’s also on her way to establishing herself as the photographer of choice for events throughout the startup community.
Thanks to our sponsor
“This ties in closely with Dwolla,” Jones, 28, said of the Des Moines-based online cash transfer startup. “I was looking into payment method options (for her company), and a wedding client strongly suggested I sign up for Dwolla. Not long after, I got an email from (Dwolla founder) Ben Milne saying he really enjoyed my website and wanted to do a blog post.”
That blog post turned into Jones taking headshots of Milne and shortly thereafter a job taking photos at a Dec. 1 meetup at Mars Café, where Dwolla launched its service nationally. In addition to the 120-plus people who were included at the meetup, countless others were exposed to her work through the press coverage and social media outreach that followed.
Dwolla Meetup on December 1, 2010. Photo by Anna Jones | Art of Photography.
Jones has since shot the March Dwolla meetup at Caberet West Glen with more than twice as many people in attendance and the most recent Startup Weekend Des Moines.
“The energy (in the startup community) is nothing but positive, and it feels good to see so many people supporting and challenging each other,” Jones said. “The transition of an idea into something tangible is awesome to see, and at an event like Startup Weekend, it is literally happening right in front of your eyes, like the time-lapse video of a flower blooming that you watched in fourth-grade science class.”
Jones’ photography phase “started when I was old enough to operate a camera, and my interest never really waned,” Jones said. “I took classes in middle school, high school and college. While my work was always improving, my grades were only so-so because I never quite followed the directions for the project given by the teacher. I liked to use the term ‘artistic interpretation’ as a guise for ‘I just wanted to do this instead.’ ”
As an entrepreneur, Jones views the local creative class from multiple angles and sees a positive overlap.
“Des Moines has an immensely talented photography community, and it’s getting better every day,” Jones said. “Like the startup community, the ones that come out on top seem to be the ones who are able to respond to challenges in a positive way – by stepping up their game and enjoying every minute of it.”
Des Moines Startup Weekend, March 4-6, 2011. Photos by Anna Jones | Art of Photography.
Photographing the startup community can be an advantageous position, and she’s using it as something to inspire her to innovate and not just as a job.
Jones said she loved hearing Christian Renaud (co-founder of Startup City Des Moines) say something at Startup Weekend along the lines of, “Your idea is probably not original, but your execution and timing can be.”
“I think people should embrace failure and always, always continue to cultivate new ideas, because chances are one of them is going to catch on,” she said, “but how can that happen if you’re stuck dwelling on the ones that didn’t?”
Editor’s Note: This article also appeared in last week’s issue of Juice magazine. To learn more about our partnership, see our post: “Announcing our partnership with Juice.”
