Padre Island Madre<\/a>\u201d is showcasing the charm and natural beauty of Padre Island, and building a social media community of more than 100,000 people who follow her for her daily views.<\/p>\nMany Coastal Bend residents may recognize her photos, even if they don\u2019t know the woman behind the camera.<\/p>\n
“I’ve just always had a camera in my hand. I’ve always loved taking pictures, and I always knew I wanted to be a photographer, but I honestly never knew that this is where I was gonna end up,” she said.<\/p>\n
Often called ‘Madre,’ she said her passion for photography deepened after she and her family moved to the island four years ago from Amarillo, TX.<\/p>\n
“Had a month long beach vacation here and that kind of sold us. We knew we wanted to stay forever,” she said.<\/p>\n
Each day at sunrise, she heads outdoors to capture everything from wildlife to fishermen \u2014 moments she shares with her growing online audience.<\/p>\n
“I wanted a place to post my pictures. And little by little, I started getting more followers and it took me about a year to get to 1000 followers, and then it started growing from there and now we’re almost at year 4 with 105,000 followers,” she said.<\/p>\n
Padre Island Madre said she believes relatability is what makes her page resonate with so many.<\/p>\n
“Before I moved here I was the person that was on Facebook watching videos of Padre Island and looking at pictures,” she said.<\/p>\n
She added that she\u2019s grateful for the community that has formed around her work, and the one that’s embraced her offline on the island.<\/p>\n
“I want to be their happy place and bring them the peace that they need, these waves of peace, because that’s all somebody needs sometimes during the day,” she said.<\/p>\n
This year, she’s expanding her photography beyond sunrises to showcase the island at different times throughout the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Local photographer Padre Island Madre\u2019s sunrise photos have created a 100K-member community on social media drawn to her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[155,157,156],"class_list":["post-173700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi","tag-corpus-christi-headlines","tag-corpus-christi-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}