a moment of dubious confidence, but I know this much to be true.

I've been thinking lately about what makes a 'real' photographer, a 'real' artful photo.

You've seen it as much as I have. Photography that's technically proficient but uninspired. Motivational poster-style. A black border and all-caps Times New Roman underneath: REACH FOR THE STARS. Generic landscapes. Posed studio portraits. Stiffness and contrivance. Photographs so self-consciously weighted with the photographer's interjection that you pause and wonder who wants this stuff?

Somebody does. I guess. People who need to be reminded to AIM HIGH.

Plenty among us are 'real' photographers. Educated, paid. Plenty more are learning as we go, halfway through courses, paid on occasion. Plenty more are simply prolific. No matter what you are, you roll in sand with hand-me-down lenses. You chase the flare of a low-hanging sun. You relish the chance to photowalk. All of it because you're passionate about capturing souls -- and it's that passion that makes you fresh. Your photographs -- so unselfconscious, so spontaneous -- make me smile. You evoke. You play and follow rather than dominate and stage.

All of you are proof.

It's not the photographer's credentials or gear that make a photograph interesting. It's the story she tells. Never mind 'real'. This community is authentic. And that makes me proud to be here, with you.

+++

Today, share with us a shutter sister that inspires you -- a woman photographer either known to us, or someone new. I've got two. Lauren Peralta's portraits are unspeakably beautiful, sexy, dignified. I'd never considered getting a tattoo -- or experimenting more with self-portraits -- until I saw hers. Sheye Rosemeyer bends light. It does as she bids it. Her photos taste like marshmallow bananas and strawberry cream. While both are vastly different from one another and from me -- in method, style, setting, and subjects (and sheer skill) -- both make me lean in to my screen and gasp how does she do that?

How about you? Share with us someone we know, or someone we don't. Tell me how they inspire you to try something different. Today, I feel like basking in righteous female clicks. Pass 'em on.

monochrome

Around here they call the ocean a meat-grinder. Chews up, spits out. Nor'easter storms hit my parents' house head-on and rip off shingles, drench the house in angry spray.

In a spitting rain I wander through a bramble, blackberry thorns tugging at my pants, and the whole of everything I see feels tired and cranky. I capture drips on the old apple tree, the twist of disintegrating rope that holds the wooden swing by a thread. The ground littered with dead leaves that sink back into earth. The old shed, weathered, the window blown out two decades ago.

But somehow the poetry of it escapes me. It's just grey. And then I see: that is the poetry. That we endure this winter, that we wait, all of us shuffling, dreaming of fruit.

+++

Today, share with us your unexpected poetry -- and the status of your season.

imperfect love

Some are happy accidents, and some the reward of patient study. Others are entirely improper, theoretically speaking. But there's a place in our photographic lives for satisfaction of all stripes.

Internal heckler: The foreground's out of focus.

Creative voice: True, but...

Internal heckler: When am I ever going to learn to tighten up a couple of stops on the wide-open aperture? It's not always appropriate.

Creative voice: Yeah, but...

...

Creative voice: Lemme run this through some processing anyway. See what I can make of it.

(ZING)

Internal heckler: Oh... a different skin. Look! They're a crowd. They've gathered. It's not just a blundered foreground. It's a part of the story. It is their depth.

Creative voice: I could have told you that.

+++

Today, share with us a capture that is, technically, a bit of a photographic fumble -- but that speaks to you, regardless. 

the beauty of backbone: nurturing for Haiti

It doesn't unfurl like silk, release a scent, flutter in breeze. A stem draws moisture, a channel of nourishment as well as fortitude. A stem feeds something beautiful. A stem is a backbone.

Nurturing isn't just about hope or prayer, as welcome as those gestures are. It's about resources and food and water and shelter. Literal, tangible, everyday caring -- the very same we do as mothers. Picking up and putting away. Wiping and lifting and stirring supper with one hand while tussling a scruffy, three-foot head with the other. This is the nurturing that keeps souls safe, keeps bellies from rumbling. It is plain and often unseen and unrecorded and yet it keeps whole families straight up and down, growing taller.

For a while, until we need not be, we can be Haiti's stem.

+++

Bright and early this morning, the virtual doors opened at To Haiti with Love, an auction and gathering of creative spirits and many of our own beloved shutter sisters.

René came up with the idea about a week ago -- literally. She emailed me, and responded by cannonballing into it, landing on top of her head. Within hours, emails were fast and furious and our community of artistic friends responded without hesitation.

With all proceeds going to the St. Joseph's family of homes for children in Port au Prince, Haiti, we're selling a Mondo Beyondo pass from the lovely Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher, a parade of beautiful (and many familiar, in these parts) photographic prints, original artwork, clothing, a coveted Shutter Sisters flash bulb necklace, my mother's unspeakably wonderful bird mobile, homemade maple marshmallows, and a weekend ski getaway in a historic cabin in Telluride, Colorado that comes complete with a small, blonde, Maritime female hobo-skier camped out on your front porch. And that's just to name just a few of the treasures up for bidding. More items will be added every day, so visit often throughout the week -- we've got such fabulous items waiting in the wings I can hardly keep my grinning mouth shut.

As photographers and authors and painters and toymakers and quilters, we offer what we know. Useful things, beautiful things. All tangible. Perhaps it's not the same as being able to pick up, dust off, offer embraces and warmth as motherhood would compel us. Perhaps it's much, much better. It's the means and the resources from which self-nurturing springs.

St. Joseph's nurtures Haiti's future innovators and artists and leaders. It creates family where there was none. Let's nurture them in the endeavour.

+++

At the heart of all things good, there is a stem of love and caring, support and nurturing. Whether it's over the miles, giving to perfect strangers or to our own children, we outstretch our arms and hold those who need to be held. We are women. It's what we do.

This month we're celebrating how we love with our One Word Project for the month: Nurture. If you're new to the One Word Project we invite you to read more about it on our OWP about page.

What does the act of nurturing look like in your everyday? What does nurturing look like when it's an extraordinary act?

love on a teaspoon

He'd never been so sick. Scorching to the touch, dripping, lethargic, coughing uncontrollably, waking up through the night in delirious discomfort. The kind of sick that you watch the clock for, to keep ahead of symptoms with proactive teaspoons of relief. The kind of sick that gets him whatever his listless whine requests: a fourth episode of Backyardigans, a bubble bath at lunchtime, marshmallows in his alpha bits. 

Today, show us candid quietness and caring and neediness. Show us exhaustion and pajama days. Show us unposed, unglittery, unbuoyant love.