Perfectly Imperfect Focus

When I first started shooting photography, I wanted perfectly crisp shots that were so focused they made you want to reach out and touch them. This was my goal with every single picture. When I did not achieve this, I felt like I had failed. It is funny how my photography beginnings paralleled my daily life. I wasted so many years trying to live up to this standard of perfection that others had outlined for me. You want to talk about setting yourself up to fail, try living up to other people's standards.

A couple of years ago, I was introduced to the Lensbaby and shooting for me became a new adventure. With the lens being manual, I had to go back to my film shooting roots and set my shutter speed and aperture manually. I admit, I was not a fan of the lens the first day I used it. I could not get my images sharp to save my life and I had become so dependent on using the semi-automatic settings on my camera that I had forgotten how to manually change my settings. Around this same time, I noticed a shift in my life. I had lost my identity, I was not sleeping well, I hated my job and I was still trying to live up to an impossible standard of perfection. I went on a hunt for the perfect hobby, thinking I would "find" myself in one of the five or so I did all at once. It did not work. I was still unhappy.

When I stopped trying to shoot the perfect picture, I started to appreciate the perfect imperfection of the lens. I discovered I loved shooting macro images of flowers. When I stopped trying to be perfect and embraced the simple pleasure of making a photograph, I found myself looking for imperfections in everything around me. It was this letting go of perfection that helped me love myself. Loving myself changed everything for me. I cut myself some slack, stopped apologizing for the person I was and embraced every single imperfect thing about myself.

Over the past year, I have been discovering who I am growing into. I will not lie and say the process has been pain-free. It has been downright painful, but the easiest thing I have been able to do is let go of perfection completely. Only God is perfect. And, if He can love me for who I am, imperfections and all, who am I to not love myself? This simple fact is when everything came into focus for me. Loving yourself...it starts there.

Words and self-portrait (reflection in The Bean, Chicago, IL) courtesy of Honorary Sisters / Guest Blogger Lucrecer Braxton, the woman beyond Art Slam.

Experimenting

I don't know for how long I had been salivating over Polaroid images from fellow photographers and wondering what sorts of images I could shoot if only I had the guts to try it. But no, instead of playing and experimenting, I held back because I felt some sort of confinement within the type of photography I usually do: sharp, saturated, colorful. I did not want to get out of my style box so to speak.

Then just before my recent trip to Mexico, I had a moment of compulsion and ordered a refurbished SX70 and a few packs of TZ & 600 film from the Impossible Project shop. Gulp! A few hundreds of dollars later I was highly committed to at least try it out, even if I had to hide the results forever inside a trunk in the attic!

Little did I know that it would be so much fun! Not only did I gasp at each step of the analog process with child's delight, but I also fell in love with the results achieved by trying out the different types of film. For some of you old school photographers, this may be as trivial as rice and beans. But for a digital self taught girl like me, this experience was an exciting gourmet experience. And the results were fun to see, because despite the medium, I realized that my eyes still capture and frame things the same way, which was really reaffirming and heart warming for me.

This week, I encourage you to get out of your box. If you've been shooting with a zoom lens for too long, try a prime. If you have been shooting digital, try film. If you always do color, play with black and white. Let's challenge our brain and stretch those creative muscles!

What has been begging you to try new ways to experiment? If you have already been experimenting, show us what you've got, we'd love to see!

bright shiny things

Sometimes when we see ourselves in a new light we are surprised by what we see. Sometimes a different lens can highlight a detail or a feature we may have overlooked. We're often hard on ourselves; much more so than anyone else could ever be and we can fail to see what those around us see. Our strength. Our beauty. Our talent. The list goes on and on. Seeing ourselves with kind and gentle eyes can be the biggest gift we could ever give ourselves. Sometimes it just takes our sisters to help us see it.

Share with us a shiny new you today. Something playful, reflective, pretty, real. Have fun seeing yourself in a whole new light.

Pictured above in my self-portrait with me is Meredith and Maile. Oh how grand it was to finally meet them face to face; lens to lens.

center of attention

Much of the time when I'm composing my shots I purposefully set my subjects off center. But sometimes the symmetry of the perfectly centered subject can feel like pure poetry. With a shot like this one the artistic boost from the Lensbaby Super Wide gave it that little extra something to make this a favorite from this end of the summer afternoon.

Today, share a shot where your subject was truly the center of attention.

the big picture

 

Through my lens, I've always been drawn to the details. And since my favorite (macro) lens rarely leaves my camera, it's easy to see the things one might often miss.

And then, this summer, I got my hands on the Lensbaby Super-Wide Conversion Lens. My eyes have officially been opened to the wondrous world of landscapes. There's something about capturing the vast horizon at the edge of the world or the endless sky of sweeping cloudsthat makes you feel really tiny. A single grain of sand in the desert. One small yet sparkling star in the galaxy. It's humbling, liberating and inspiring.

Show us your favorite landscape shot today. The kind of shot that takes your breath away again and again. A shot that gives the kind of perspective we all need; a reminder of how big and beautiful the world is.