The couple separated before 1910 and she lived in a cabin on Thirty-Second Street with her dog Rory, a dozen tamed birds, and occasionally with her mother. She was active in the growing bohemian community of the San Francisco Bay Area and became close friends with the Oakland writer Jack London and the Berkeley poet and naturalist Charles Keeler. Perhaps seeking her own artistic outlet, she began photographing in 1901. Soon she was exhibiting and within two years she had developed a reputation as a master of pictorial photography. The first public display of her work came in January 1902 with other members of the California Camera Club at San Francisco's Second Photographic Salon in the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art. Her "Portrait of Mr. Morrow" was singled out in the press and was reproduced in the popular monthly "Camera Craft". That journal praised her photos at the Los Angeles Salon of 1902 and over the next decade reproduced over a dozen of her prints. She used a shared darkroom (a converted barn) on Oakland's Brockhurst Street.