The Sparkle of Reinvention

On Christmas morning my youngest daughter was a scallywag princess, a keyboard playing ballerina and a tap dancing cowgirl all within a few hour timeframe. As she vacillated from one role to the next she confidently became her persona of choice without hesitation or apology. The family all encouraged her and played along as she reinvented herself via costume changes, hair and makeup and attitude. A lot of attitude. She was living each of the characters she longed to be in vivid color from cattle rustling swagger to dainty plie .

Today, as I thumb through the photos of a morning filled with impossible magic I know I have a lot to learn from a four year old. The freedom she allows herself to be exactly who she wants to be from one minute to the next is an example of how to live in the moment. No regret, no fear, just unbridled passion in forward motion.

In my creative journey I have come to a crossroads of sorts. I have approached a place where a whole new world is opening up to me as I truly begin to explore digital photography. I feel like I am learning to create my art via a brand new medium and as I do, I am changing and growing. This is a good thing, I know. But I can’t pretend that I’m not resistant sometimes. I have found myself clinging to my old ways, holding on to my self-proclaimed title of being a low-tech photographer. It’s where I have felt safe for so long; the place I have grown comfortable living even though I have long grown weary of it. I believe it’s time to step up for a costume change.

As the New Year begins, I am looking forward to letting go a little and dancing into the wide open spaces of reinvention. Now all I need is a pony and a comfortable pair of sparkle shoes.

Hope

As we wind down an old year and get ready to bring in the new, one of the most overwhelming feelings I experience is hope.  A new year brings so much potentiality -- so many opportunities to make the coming year better than the previous.

It's a clean slate.  A whole new world.

I'm one of those people who believes that writing down your hopes, your expectations, your aspirations is one of the first steps to manifesting them.  So, I'd like to go on record:

I hope this coming year represents a quantum leap in my, my husband's and my daughter's discovering our true bliss, whatever that may be for each of us.  I hope we all -- me, you, everyone -- come a bit closer to respecting each other, and even more importantly, celebrating each other, for all our fabulous differences. 

What do you hope for in the coming year? 

Simpler

My relationship with photography has been a long, tumultuous road. Where most people go from hobby to career; I was the opposite. This was a job for me WAY before it was a passion. Over the years, I'd want to improve, so I'd get a book or take a class. But I never enjoyed them, thinking the teachers were too rigid and judgmental. It's funny how we see the world based on our own biases. Because in retrospect, now I see that it was ME who was all of those things. I used to think that for an image to be good, there had to be REASONS WHY. It had to COMMUNICATE. It had to be PROFOUND. These beliefs completely set me up for failure. More than that, it made my work stagnate, because the mountain of perfection is ALWAYS too hard to climb. So rather than attempt the impossible, I just continued doing my repetetive photography job. I'd get bored and quit for a while. Only to go back and get bored again. I did this for over ten years. Until one day, I completely burned out. I knew that I would never touch a camera again, if I couldn't find a way to be excited about it. So, I LET GO OF WHAT I THOUGHT A PHOTOGRAPHER WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. I decided that my expectations were complicating things; and that art according to me, was going to be simple. Do I like it? Am I drawn to it? Does it make me want to look for a few seconds longer? By letting go of the "shoulds" and the "what if I fail"s, I was able to take the risks that are necessary to be creative. Now for the first time in over a decade of working in this business, I can say that I love photography. And that things are often much simpler than we make them out to be.

What I Remember

For many of us, taking the photos that document our lives is just a part of our daily routine. I shoot pictures of my children just about every day, but it wasn’t until the other night that the importance of each of these seemingly effortless images I snap away came into clear focus.

On the eve of my oldest daughter’s tenth birthday, I watched her pull from our family albums, her favorite baby pictures for use in her fifth grade auto biography. She mused over what she liked about each one and embellished with the details she remembered about them. It dawned on me that there really wasn’t anything she vividly remembered about the actual moment these photos were captured. How could she when she was just a baby? I imagine that what she was remembering were the photographs themselves. Revisiting the baby pictures she had grown up looking at stirred the memories of the photos themselves and the stories I have shared with her about them.

I listened as she reflected, I remember this one, I used to wear that orange outfit all the time, we called it my carrot suit. I loved that quilt, didn’t I? I remember Grandma made it for me. Oh, remember that I used to snuggle with that bunny. I love this picture. I heard her recalling her life as these photographs have narrated it for her. I too have photos like that--images of my young life that take me back to a moment in time that although may have slipped from my memory, is stirred up by both the picture and my mother’s stories. I guess it doesn’t really matter if I can remember these details or not, but I do have the photos as tangible proof that I had a grand first birthday party with a gazillion guests, that I wore my favorite Minnie Mouse dress on Easter and that I was “such a good little traveler” when my parents and I drove across the country in a Volkswagen Bus.

Hearing my own daughter speak of her baby days like that, like she actually remembers those days reminds me that when I am taking pictures I am doing something important. I am creating for her a visual treasury that she will have to help her remember her life. That I love doing it is just icing on the cake.