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.

Creating this image was not entirely planned beforehand, in that I decided to do it while shooting something else entirely. The “how” was planned and the “why” and the exact composition, but that was all conceived only moments before shooting it. Usually I let my ideas sit for at least a week before execution.

I was actually shooting an ad campaign when I decided to do a personal photo with the same setup. The client had requested an old warehouse-type space, and I thanked my lucky stars for the floor in this picture, which was from White House Custom Color. I had seen it at an expo and was blown away by how realistic it looked. I am now addicted and I feel the need to cover my entire home in different WHCC floors. Ridiculous? Perhaps. But hey, a girl can dream.

So I set up the floor in my living room. From an underwater shoot I had done I had a whole bunch of black fabric, so I put some chairs on top of my couch, and, in true “professional” fashion, I fixed the black fabric to the chair tops with hair ties. I know, my methods are way futuristic.

The finishing touch was to put a light above the subject. I love overhead light if I do light scenes artificially, so I used a Sweetlight on a stand and hung it above. I had been using tin foil (from my kitchen, about 20 feet away), for makeshift barn doors to block light, but decided against it in the final shot.

I photographed my legs and my dress and my upper body and my hair in different pictures, and then had a blast putting them together later on. All in all, the picture felt very natural to produce and it was fun to shoot like that, where everything just clicked.

I’ll be sharing the details of how this image was put together at my workshop in New Jersey, and I’ll be talking about that ad campaign as part of my business workshop in Phoenix in June.

When it came time to do the class, I nearly forgot that it was nighttime! I was envisioning everything being lit by a window. So instead of panicking with 20 minutes to spare before class, I once again nagged the Sweetlight team and asked if they could put one light with a softbox above the subject, pointing directly down. Everyone looked at me like I was nuts…which I might be, but in my mind, I wanted to simulate a moon. So I figured the best way to do that would be to put the light overhead and diffuse it.

Once the light was set the class gathered, and we began building. We started with a simple setup: dirt on the floor (thank you WHCC!), a black backdrop, and our model Marsha laying on top. I put a lantern in her hand and made it look like a forest scene with a girl who had fallen asleep under the night sky.

From there we began adding leaves, and then sticks, and then eventually a bed.

(I should definitely say thank you to the hotel for providing the bed, though I actually think they still have no idea that we covered it in dirt and sticks, so probably best to not mention it…).

My method was to build the scene up, starting with something simple and ending in a crescendo of a beautiful dream sequence – a girl dreaming in the forest at night, still sleeping in her bed. It was probably the most fun I’ve had teaching as far as the actual shooting goes…and to imagine, it was all in a ballroom at a hotel with one light and a black background. That is why I love photography. You can make it whatever you want, your dreams can become a reality, and you can do it with your own rules.

If you’d like to purchase this print to support the Saving Eliza charity, you can do so here!

If you had a blank space, how would you decorate it?

Isn’t int incredible how much we can do? I haven’t scratched the surface of what could be done to bring my imagination to life, and thinking about the possibilities makes me giddy with excitement. I can go out and create something singlehandedly that could express what words cannot. I say “I” selfishly as I write on my own blog, but of course I mean that to extend to all people with any craft. Photography allows me a medium in which I feel comfortable working. But I believe that anything in life that allows you to feel complete and understood is an art form.

Creating this image was fun and simple. I love pictures like that. No crazy setup (aside from dragging all of these vines into an abandoned seminary). No strange Photoshop work of putting body parts together. No flying girls or anything “fancy”. Just a girl standing trapped (or maybe willingly blended) into the scene. It felt, to me, the right kind of simple for what I wanted to say.

What does your fantasy world look like? If you could wake up and see anything, hear anything, smell anything…what would it be? Do you work to create that reality?

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You can watch the creation process of this image, and some of the editing slowed down, on my creativeLIVE class “Master Your Craft” – you can look at both of my cL classes in the STORE on this blog.

Special thanks to Jane Love for modeling, Nikoma Souza for hair/makeup, and the whole creativeLIVE team for just plain being amazing and allowing me to do this.

All of these things make me bubble with excitement. But then there is one thing that weighs heavily on my mind, and that is a change that I’m quite sad about. I can see the silver lining, and I’ll be posting about why later this year, but for now, I want to speak about the darker side.

My very first convention that I ever spoke at was After Dark. I was invited into the family with open arms and was allowed to be completely myself, no matter what. Ever since then I’ve been an advocate of what they do there, and am proud to say that I have become a part of that process and team. I feel so loved when I attend. I try to love on as many people as possible. It is one big lovely love fest.

But at the end of March, the last After Dark will take place. It is like seeing a part of my heart wash away, but at the same time, I know that things must change. If it weren’t for the extreme kindness of the family of After Dark, especially Dave Junion, I might not have found my voice. I knew that I had something to say, but I didn’t know where to say it. AD has become my home away from home, and I will miss it terribly.

I think that we all have something like that in our lives, be it a person or a place or a thing…something that makes us feel accepted, or welcomed, or just like we can be ourselves. That is After Dark to me, and even though it won’t live on past this final convention, I will take what I have gained from it and apply it to everything that I do. I will move forward with a passionate intensity that makes me feel good about being myself. I will spread the love that I learned there to everyone in my path. And I will make sure that AD doesn’t ever fully go away, as I know so many people will do, because we will take what we learned and allow that to guide us in the future.

I sincerely hope that you’ll join me for this last After Dark. I will be giving it my all when I’m there. I’m not going to be fancy. I’m not going to do backflips and tricks (except that one levitation class…). I’m just going to teach from my soul and give all that I can.

THE CONTEST:

Dave said that I could give away a free pass to After Dark running from March 30-April 2 in St. Louis, MO. If you would like to join us, please leave a comment with one paragraph about how you think that this experience will help your future. We’ll be picking one winner to join us!

Deadline is February 16th at 11PM PST.

Do you have something in your life like this? Something that makes you feel like you are okay to be yourself? A person, place, thing? Please do share, I love knowing what is near and dear to your heart.

A self-sustaining photography school free for survivors of human trafficking.

This is where we hope to have your help and support. The incredible photo community is one of a kind and I believe that if everyone donated just one dollar, the could fund this project. I am so hopeful, nervous to ask, humbled, and eager to see this project off the ground. So many emotions running through my body…so I’ll leave it there. I’ll let the campaign page say it all.

And if we do nothing else today, let’s promote passion in our own lives and in the lives of others.

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Photography School for Survivors of Human Trafficking