Fresno, California. A California cattle ranch is preparing for a livestock sale, complete with taking pictures of the animals to be sold. Who do you suppose was taking these high quality photos? Would you believe, a professional photographer from half a continent away in Kansas?
Heidi and Charles Anderson are the owners of Legacy Livestock Imaging, the company which took those California photos. Heidi was a city girl and self-described Air Force brat. Her father served all over the nation, and she had visited 48 of the 50 states before she got out of high school. While her dad was serving at the Air Force base in Topeka, Heidi started at Washburn University.
“I thought I’d be gone in six months,” Heidi said. “Now it’s been 22 years.”
As a kid, Heidi came to appreciate photography. “We moved around so much that we valued capturing images of where we’d been,” she said. “It was how we learned to communicate.”
She earned degrees in finance and accounting, but she followed her interest into becoming a professional portrait photographer. For example, she photographed ballet companies as far away as Seattle and Atlanta.
One day at church in Topeka, she met a guy named Charles Anderson. Their interests could not seem to have been farther apart: City girl versus farm boy. She was a dancer and art photographer. His background? Cattle. But something clicked between them.
