In the third grade, a young Meghan Marvin stumbled upon the sport of distance running.
The redshirt senior started as a little assistant accompanying and helping her father, Rod, with odd jobs while he served as a track and field coach at Cedarwood Elementary. Her proximity to the track eventually translated into her partaking in competitions of her own.
After dabbling in the different events, it didn’t take long for Marvin to find her focus.
“I tried all the events and I was horrible at them,” Marvin said. “I did the 800, and I knew I was a distance runner because I was beating all the boys. I did the mile and I just loved it and I just continued running ever since then.”
Now with NCAA cross country season coming to an end, Marvin is set to finish the final leg of her collegiate distance-running career and plans to move onto another love of hers that’s developed over the years.
It all started when she was a sophomore in college – Marvin would stumble upon a gift from her father that began framing the rest of her life.
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When Rod Marvin bought his daughter a Canon Rebel T3i for Christmas, he said he never knew that his gift would spark her interest for photography.
“I guess,” Rod Marvin said with a laugh. “I’ve thought about that.”
In fact, he wasn’t even thinking about a different form of media when he made that purchase.
“I didn’t understand it, where she got this interest in photography,” Rod Marvin said. “I would think she’d be more into videoing.”
Instead, he remembered when a young Meghan would perform in plays with her cousins, which he would film and later piece together to create home movies.
Rod Marvin thought investing in a DSLR camera would give her an opportunity to relive those moments from the other side of the lens.
What Meghan Marvin saw from the gift was a throwback to her younger days when she liked taking photos for fun. But handling sophisticated photography equipment would need to come with some preparation.
“I learned all by myself. It was really hard at first because I hadn’t taken any classes in high school or anything,” Meghan Marvin said. “So I was just playing around like ‘I don’t know what any of this does.’”
After a few YouTube videos and questions pitched to friends who understood more of the technical know-hows of DSLR cameras, Marvin was all set to begin clicking the shutter button.
“I just started taking pictures for fun of anything I could take pictures of, just testing it out, and I pretty much fell in love with it,” Meghan Marvin said. “I’ve been taking pictures ever since, gotten new equipment, new stuff, it just keeps adding on and adding on. I love it.”
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What started off as a solo endeavor to navigate the world through a viewfinder has developed into a vested interest in the subject.
Marvin’s experience in photography has inevitably led to fellow Bruin athletes asking if she can help take photographs of them in action, which she does, although she admits it’s not her forte.
“It’s hard,” Marvin said. “I’m just not good with the fast movement stuff. I like to be like, ‘Okay, relax and do this with your face, and do this and smile and laugh,’ or do candid shots.”
Just like how Meghan Marvin found her focus with track and field early on, she’s managed to do the same with her photography.
Right now, Marvin has started her own small business at UCLA, the self-titled MegMarvin Photography, where she offers portrait services. Past shoots feature many senior portraits of graduating UCLA students and groups.
While Marvin managed to accrue experience taking single-subject shots mostly on her own, it’s wedding and engagement shoots that she wants to specialize in after she moves on to a professional career.
Marvin decided that she needed to get more experience in that field before starting her own business, so she sent an email early last year to Chloe Moore, a photographer based in Manhattan Beach, asking for an internship.
“Right when she first came to me I could tell that she was drawn the same way I was, which was why I liked to work with her,” Moore said.
Since April, Marvin has been working six hours twice a week at Moore’s studio learning about the trade.
Marvin has accompanied Moore on wedding and engagement shoots to learn from her mentor, while also having the opportunity to shoot at wedding photo booths to give Moore a chance to critique her photography skills.
She’s even proven to be capable of going the extra mile on one occasion when Moore fell ill before a scheduled wedding shoot.
“I called her the night before and I was like ‘I need you!’ So she was my crutch the next day,” Moore said. “She definitely stepped up and that was pretty cool to see especially since it was three months into her working with me. She took the reins and did a lot of independent stuff during the wedding that only my fully trained wedding photographers and assistants are allowed to do.”
While Moore has been able to offer Marvin a chance to shoot three weddings and two engagements so far, Marvin’s mentor has also been able to offer lessons that come from a perspective of someone who’s managed to set up a successful photography business.
It’s an important – and according to the both of them, overlooked – skill for photographers who want to set up their own businesses. At the same time, it’s a skill that involves more bookkeeping than photo taking.
“If she ever decides to be a photographer herself, then she knows from the very beginning how to do taxes. It’s not very exciting,” Moore said with a laugh. “But very necessary to know.”
With the balancing act of completing her English degree, running her last races at UCLA and her interning with Moore, Marvin admits that her cultivating her own photography business has taken more of a backseat in recent months.
Once fall quarter is over, Marvin intends to devote her relinquished time to photography by continuing to intern under Moore and demystify the process of starting her own business as a photographer.
“Right now, photography’s kind of slow just because I’m really focusing on running and this last quarter,” Marvin said. “But after that I want to continue to work with Chloe and I’ll have a lot of time to be working with her and do more weddings … and just start my own business and hope it goes well. Fingers crossed!”