Ellie Stone Photography

Ellie Stone
http://www.elliestone.smugmug.com

Ellie has a magnificent combination of passion, enthusiasm, and skill in photography!

Ellie Stone's experience with photography goes back 30 years. Her photographic interests are quite broad; from landscape to wildlife, weddings to photojournalism, portraits to night photography, and even the fast action trickery of sporting events. Years ago, Ellie combined one of her passions with another and plunged head first into volunteering for animal welfare. Ellie has spent time in Africa, volunteering for Elephant Voices Conservation and Research Project, and the Mara-Noboisho Lion Project. She provides valuable information, along with wildlife photos, which aids in the ongoing research of these projects. Ellie also volunteers her photographic talent on a weekly basis for the Humane society, where her high quality images help homeless pets find their new forever homes. Her work proved remarkable, and she quickly received notoriety by being published in magazines and newspapers.

As a teacher, Ellie's passion, enthusiasm, and affection for capturing the beauty of the world through photography is infectious. Teaching is one of her tremendous strengths as she has an uncanny skill of listening and understanding her student's unique ways of learning. By doing so, she caters to each student's learning style so her students maximize their photographic learning potential.

Besides Ms. Stone's obvious passion for photography, her diversity and interests are infinite! She is a triathlete, accomplished equestrian, chef, business woman and gifted runner. Ellie qualified for and competed in the Boston Marathon in 2011, the most competitive marathon in the world, and re-qualified for 2012. She currently resides in the SanFrancisco Bay area.

Monique say's "Goodbye" to the Record Label

For many artists, signing a record deal is the ultimate dream come true. It means that someone bigger than you believes in your craft and hopefully can use everything within their power to help you reach a bigger platform. Many of you know that one year ago I signed a record deal. I was super excited! Who would have thought that after 20 years in this industry, many releases, and working my ass off, and let's face it, I'm not 19 anymore, a label wanted ME! I'll be honest here, I was very much looking forward to someone else taking the reins for a bit, allowing me to focus more on my music.

But this is what I realized in the process......


Signing a record deal means that before you make ANY moves, regardless of what it is, there's another entity that has to approve it. That took some getting used to. It also meant that there was one more person that got a chunk of my rewards. But perhaps the one thing that was my deciding factor in NOT re-signing my contract when it termed a week ago was that in the scheme of things I realized that I was trying to write songs that would please them, instead of staying true to myself. Somewhere within the last year it started to feel like a job instead of my passion, and that wasn't going to work for me! Music is the expression of feelings with instrumental behind it, and it's vastly important to me that each time a fan downloads my music that they're getting everything I've got, and listeners aren't stupid, they'll hear the difference.

I do want to say that I'm not against record labels, AR peeps, or any other companies associated with management of artists, I'm always open to new ideas, this was more about me taking the reins back of my career and releasing some really great music.

So what's next? Well, a date has been set for the studio to start writing my first album. A collection of original material. My guess is that the process will be quick with Bill Hare at the controls, and I'll be so excited to share the album with everyone.

Thank you to so many of you that support my dream!

Monique