A little while ago I found a big black feather and took it home with me, hoping to use it for a photo. I promptly forgot about it until it suddenly appeared in my car, and I decided to put it to use. I love the way that the human form can be so evocative, expressing emotion much the same way as our faces. Contorting a certain way, lighting a certain way, and through editing we are able to create atmosphere with almost no help from outside elements. In this case I wore an ace bandage and made sure the lighting was more severe than I normally utilize.

I chose to pose against a wall that had only one light source: a window coming from the left. After that, it became simple to find a pose that felt right, and the shoot was over quickly.

How often do you use a white wall or blank canvas to create your art? Share it if you’ve shot it!

I’m actually en route to France right now where she will be modeling for an artist retreat I’m hosting there, and then, just a week after that, we’ll be meeting again in Iceland! I hope that you enjoy the process that went into this edit. And please check out Jen’s blog post as well!

Have you ever collaborated with another artist – model, painter, sculptor, poet, art director…anything at all? I’d love to see pics from collaborations you’ve engaged in!

Model: Jen Brook, photographed in Norfolk UK August 2014. Fish purchased from shutterstock.com.

How often do you live in madness?

[Transcript of video] I was thinking about Alice in Wonderland and how they not only introduce, but unashamedly applaud crazy individuals. What if we lived in a world where that was also encouraged, where we could be as mad as we like and we were applauded for it. Well, the truth is, that we do live in that world, only it is a world of elitism. We don’t exactly applaud the mad adventures of creative people in all circumstances. It is easy to be labeled weird or strange or written off for prancing around in a nightgown in the middle of the center of Amsterdam (or is that just me?) because craziness without success is often labeled as sad. But if you are crazy, and you follow through with one of your mad plans, and it suddenly is successful either through fame or money, then you are suddenly not crazy at all, but instead you are a genius. And with that genius comes praise and acceptance and a shift of the status quo. The problem here is that many people, myself included, will have ideas that are crazy and will not succeed. We think big and we try our hardest yet still that plan doesn’t find legs, and we find ourselves back at square one. This is a natural phenomenon. This is human nature – to try and fail and try again. Yet with how easy it is to be influenced by social media and the opinions of others, how often do we really try again? How often can we say that we are making our dreams a reality through the repeated failure of said dream?

How often do we put money first, or our family’s security, or the protection of our good name in order to protect what is nice and easy and safe? How often do we blame other people for our dreams not panning out? And it is easy to do this! It is easy to say that it was so-and-so’s fault, that mean person online who told me to give up. But think back to when you were a child and your parent told you to go to bed, and you rebelliously said no. That child didn’t think twice about what was right or wrong, what was safest for him or her. No, no, you simply did what your heart wanted. Why do we lose that? We lose that sense of self because we are taught to abandon it for the betterment of everyone around us. So when Mr. or Mrs. Nobody online, who we do not know at all, tells us to quit for whatever reason they see fit, we tend to listen, because we have been taught to listen. And listen we should! But not to that person. When it comes to following your dream, it is not wise to listen to the naysayer or the person who wants us to be safe. It is important to listen to ourselves, because in our heart of hearts we know what is right and what is true. We know what makes us feel alive. And without that…if we let that slip away…we will be left with a sore heart, too full with dreams to let anything else in. And we go on with what makes us content and we fail one last time.

But what happens when we don’t. What happens when we try again, and we find new ideas to love, and we nourish those ideas until they are so big that we simply must act on them. They cannot be ignored. And they shouldn’t be, because an ignored dream can be felt by everyone around you, and it infects their minds just the same as it rots in your own. When you pursue that dream, you show the world around you that it is okay to be different, to be mad and strange and weird, and it is okay to believe in what makes your heart soar. You prove to yourself that you are worth it. And even further, you change the world by simply not giving up. It is true that people become successful in the eyes of the public because of wealth and status, but that does not make their idea any better or worthy of praise. Your idea, it is very likely, has merit of it’s own. But no one will ever know that if you don’t tell them. And you won’t tell them if you never believe in yourself enough to try.

The first little while went really well. The water was pretty clear and we were having a lot of fun. But then some boats started coming in and docking – not at our pier, as it was out of commission (I checked first!) but at a nearby pier. This caused the water to become quite choppy, and since we were near rocks, we decided to get our before it got worse. I swam while holding my camera in my huge ikelite housing and then navigated the slippery rocks out while helping my friends and continuously (per request from Kelly) checking for sea creatures underwater with my camera (I would shoot a few pics to see what we were surrounded by). I did see a couple – an octopus and an eel, but I certainly didn’t tell her that until later. Once we made it out we decided to get back in when the water calmed, and we shot a few more images before calling it a night and drinking a coconut.

Now I desperately want to go back to Hawaii. Oh, to re-live these experiences through photographs is something I do not take for granted, and I can only hope to better document my next adventure.

Model: Marsha Denill
Assistance: Kelly McGrady

In my personal journey of discovering how I like to create, I formed habits and practices that not only allow me to achieve certain looks, but more importantly dictate how happy I am going to be shooting something. If I can be in nature, I am having a good day! So when I create, I love to be in nature, shooting as much as possible on location. I love having all of the details written out beforehand so that when I create, I know exactly what needs to happen. I would say, with some confidence, that patience is not my strongest virtue. So to be able to go on location and shoot what is needed, efficiently, is a great joy to me.

I have 3 more images from this shoot that I am currently editing, but wanted to share with you, start to finish, how this image was created. It is part of a larger series that I’m still shooting this week, but it is a good representation of the intentions of the series as well as technically how they will be put together. This video explains it all.

Model: Kyna Lian

Assistant: Kelly McGrady

Music by Cyra Morgan “Hummingbird”, licensed from SongFreedom.

When I finished editing the image on air, and the cameras went off, everyone in the room let out a big sigh. We all knew it didn’t really work out but we were happy we tried. When I got home from Seattle I decided to start editing it again. I tried twice more and it still wasn’t coming together. That was when I took a slightly different approach.

I started choosing new shots to work with – a higher angle of my subject as well as different house shots from the kiddie pool so that you could see more of the house under the water, thus adding to the believability effect. Those changes made a world of difference for me, fixing some perspective issues as well as changing what was a very static shot.

I have been on a book kick lately, really wanting to experiment with how books (stories, really) can transport you to another reality. Books are old, universally recognized, and provide an amazing symbol for anyone to latch on to. There are many different emotions attached to books, but one thing remains the same. If you read, you take your imagination to a different level. What an amazing metaphor for creating.

I ended up using all of the same techniques to edit this image when I was home as I did during the CreativeLive editing segment for this picture. Some of the featured tools were the Background Eraser Tool, Curves Adjustment Layers, and changing of the Lighting Dynamics. I think something that brought the image together for me in the end was the choice of clouds, and really creating a light source as well as light variation so that some of the image was in darkness and some in light.

Thankfully the light for this image was quite natural, with no extreme highlights or shadows, so changing the light slightly was not a problem. Of course, I can’t say if the image did ever come together or not, but it did satisfy a dream I’ve had. I always know when a picture is finished when I feel it matches what I saw in my imagination…so I want to thank you for watching and for supporting this photo shoot through your encouraging words as well as to CreativeLive for setting this up for me!

I was thrilled…until I saw how the light looked, and realized I didn’t have much time to experiment. So I had my friend hold up a sheet in front of the light to diffuse it. I played with distance of light to subject, tried a rim light, and kept playing. As I was shooting I knew I didn’t like the pictures, but I thought it worthy of continuing. I recognized, right then and there, that if I stopped, I would get nothing from the shoot. Yet if I kept going, I would teach myself valuable lessons.

My pictures are not images that I’m proud of because I like how they look. Quite the contrary, I very much dislike looking at these images. I would not put them in my portfolio. But they are among the top images I have ever learned from, and just how much I dislike them tells me how much more I have to learn. Humility is a great gift, and I welcome it with each failure I endure.

Share with us an image you feel was a failure, or share a tip that you learned from messing up an image!

Mistakes are successes that we learn best from, after all.