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.

Creatively, I watch my own back. I create what I want to create, when I want to create it. And I don’t mean for that to sound selfish, but simply factual and smart. I say “smart” not because I think I’m some genius, but because the only reaction to our art that we can rely on is our own. If no one were watching, it would be all that matters. And so I create under that pretense – that I must love my art first, and then hope that it is embraced by others in some way.

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “Time to do something new.”

And so I set out in my imagination to conjure something up I had never thought of before. A technique, an idea, a location…anything.

My mind wandered to an image that I had half-heartedly pressed before, but not truly delved into. I wanted to make it look like I was coming out of a thick fog, or another dimension. Something between the two, as I would later tell my husband. He and I talked it through – how it could be created – and then I continued working on the why.

If you know me, you know I am a stickler for the why. I don’t care how neat a technique is to try if I don’t know why I’m creating. The why came simply: I wanted to create a wall between worlds, to literally step through from one side to the other. I also liked the idea of being sucked back into the world I was trying to emerge from. All of this intention informed how I would pose.

I photographed my body in a kiddie pool that I purchased for the shoot. I rigged my camera on my balcony so that I could shoot with some distance. I sunk black fabric in the pool so that the background would be dark, and then I poured soy milk in the pool for a murky effect. It didn’t take much soy milk, and soon the pool was murky and dark at the same time.

I knew I would be photographing a forest as the eventual backdrop, which is already very dark, so I thought that the murky background of darkness from the pool would transfer well to the forest.

It was important that I photograph myself in water to create believable water lines on my body. It is one thing to blur and obscure fabric and skin behind a wall of fog, but quite another to recreate water lines (or in this case, “other dimension/fog” lines) on skin especially. So I photographed myself in the pool and then made sure to photograph the forest from the same angle. The two images blended nicely, and I sampled the murky color to paint over the forest as well.

With different blending techniques and some cutting my body started to blend into the forest. After some shading, it seemed complete. I wanted the color palette to be simple and striking, so I chose to stick with red and blue as the main colors in the image. Texture only in the background helped to give the fog some grit that I felt made it more believable, and then I was finished.

All in all, this image took me…

3 hours of planning
2 hours of setup
1 hour of shooting
12 hours of editing

…And I had a blast! I hope that you enjoy the finished product, and that, if nothing else, you are inspired to try something new and see where it leads you!

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And all of this is wonderful – my favorite thing to do – aside from the fact that I forgot to bring my remote and had to run across a rocky creek in bare feet while flinging myself on top of a rock to pose in under 10 seconds.

It was so much fun though. I couldn’t imagine, in that moment, spending my time any other way.

And I’m pretty sure the fly fishermen couldn’t imagine why I was spending my time that way. Tehe! But I loved it. I live for that. Adventure and fulfillment excitement so much, and that day, I felt both tenfold. To be able to inspire yourself for an image is an amazing feeling, but to inspire yourself in life is invigorating. To me, that is what keeps the passion alive. It isn’t so much about what the picture looks like, but what it took to take it. To run out in the forest barefoot and feel at peace with my surroundings – that is my happy place.

I hope you find it to be just as comforting. Now…go live your passion!

Only about two hours later did I find my phone in my back pocket, waterlogged and dead and never turning back on. At first I groaned.

“Ugh I need to get a new phone…”

“Ugh I’m about to get on a plane to New York City in 3 hours…”

“Ugh this is a hassle…”

And then, literally moments later, I shrugged. I didn’t care. It is a PHONE. It is not the end of the world.

I laughed about it. I had just drowned my phone in a cesspool…that is kind of funny, right? And it is SO me! Of course I did that. Why haven’t I done it sooner?

And so, aside from the worry of trying to let my husband know that I was safe and sound on my travels, I had not a care in the world. I actually felt relief. As I was sitting on the plane that night it felt so amazing to know that I didn’t have to communicate in that way. I could stand in front of the people I was with and have no distractions whatsoever. I could be completely present in the moment, not thinking about sending a text or calling anyone or looking that thing up that I’ve been debating on the internet.

I spent 24 hours in NYC with no distractions.

I spent the next week at home with no distractions.

I have always hated technology in some capacity. I am a technophobe. I love having a phone to call my family, and I recognize that I need to work when I travel since I travel so much, but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it.

This experience made me decide to spent more time hiding my phone away – not answering calls and feeling frantic about the next email that will come through. You don’t have to drown your phone in a cesspool to feel free and disconnected. It is a way of life. It is a gift that you can give yourself at any time.

Look at those pictures from the cesspool shoot. I could, literally, not be a happier person. I would drown my phone again one hundred times if it meant I could relive that experience for the sheer joy that I felt doing it. I’m not afraid to say it…I love wading in filthy water to get a picture. I love the adventure of it. And that’s just me: phone in back pocket, filled with the dirtiest water you can imagine, and a smile sweeping across my face so big it could last a lifetime.

How do you feel about your phone, or being constantly connected?