Another day, another learning curve. Sometimes I go months at a time never learning anything significant. Since I started this challenge I learn something EVERY GOSH DARN DAY. It is the most beautiful thing. As an artist, do you ever have those moments where you learn something and you simply cannot believe that you didn’t know it sooner? That was me today, in so many ways…

“Wow, stop motion is so easy, even when doing it myself with a remote and timer!”

“Wow, the sun came up and I’m still able to shoot…who knew?!”

“Why don’t I make chia pudding every day?”

You know, the usual.

I got up at my new regular time of 4-something-ish and headed out the door, but the sun caught up with me today. Turns out, stop motion takes a long time to shoot when you are by yourself with no one to push the button for you. Picture: I’m alone in the desert with my remote, pointing it at my camera, waiting 2 seconds (when it decides to even trigger), and then posing for the image. For 300 images. OF COURSE the sun came up! So, I had to shoot my body in various parts so as not to get direct sun, but hey, it worked! I didn’t melt! I came out smiling! What a day!

Today is the 4th of July, Independence Day, here in the States, and naturally that had me thinking about stars. I wanted to use a sparkler for this image, but there is a fire ban where I live. We don’t even do fireworks; we do a laser show. Yeah, I said it. A laser show. It is about as interesting as you’d expect. So, fireworks being banned, I rethought my concept.

If you are celebrating today, be safe! On a personal note, I’m particularly excited because I’m making a fake-meat-fake-cheese-barbeque-sauce sandwhich…which sounds super uninteresting, and actually kind of gross, but I eat foods like that infrequently so I’m kind of excited to indulge. When I woke up this morning I rolled over to my husband and said “It’s barbecue day!” So, that’s an indication of the level of giddy I get about very unimportant things.

And if you’re not celebrating anything in particular day, keep in mind that it may be Tuesday, but it is the ONLY July 4, 2017 you’ll get, so make the most of it!

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

I have been working myself so hard lately that I decided this past weekend was solely dedicated to creating. I went out on Saturday to a lake and did a shoot I had been planning for ages, but it just didn’t work out. It looked beautiful thanks to the mostly-diffused sun behind the storm clouds, but when it came time to edit, the pieces just weren’t coming together. From crunched shadows to awkward composition, I just wasn’t feeling it. So I began to create something else the next day. I decided that in my bedroom I would create a magical little world.

This is the original sketch I drew:

But then, after I shot myself laying down on the floor, I got some ideas. What if I did _______, or what if _________ was more like ________. And so the shoot spiraled from what it was supposed to be to what it could be, and I loved that process of experimentation. When it came time to edit, I was excited to start piecing everything together. But the problem was I had shot it so fast that I didn’t give myself time to think it through. In the end, the pieces simply didn’t match for me. The nude figure with the shadow on the wall seemed not to go together. The hole in the wall worked better, but still, the nude form wasn’t the message I was trying to send.

What is the message you’re trying to send with what you create?
Share a piece that you feel represents that!