Fairytales vary from country to country, but one thing remains the same: Fairytales are cautionary tales. Some of them are sweet as sugar and oh-so-cute. Others are rather horrifying. No matter which way you interpret this theme, it is sure to be very, very fun.

Get extra weird this week with it!

I’ll pull some of the art that I see this week to feature!
Use the hashtag #PromotingPassionChallenge so I can find you!

Here is some food for thought. Enjoy the challenge, and remember to push yourself creatively!

Oh, what a glorious morning! I got to my favorite hiking spot and no one was around as far as the eye could see. I took many moments sitting atop the mountain for myself, watching the sky begin to glow yellow and pink. I did yoga and watched a crow join me for practice. It was truly beautiful. And then I took pictures, and enjoyed every little moment, even the moments in between moments. A beetle crawled up my camera strap and perched, watching.

On the drive over, and the jog to the mountain and sitting on top all the while I daydreamed about this image. The Flight of Imagination. What if more of us tapped into our imaginations and set them into flight? Can you imagine a world where we were all taught to embrace what makes us weird? Where the notion of impossible was the most absurd thing?

I imagine a world where everyone is in touch with their uniqueness and there is no shame in showing it to others. I imagine a world where oddities are celebrated, darkness is explored, and where there are no more unimaginable things, except for the very worst kind. I feel free because I dream. I feel a sense of self because I dream. My dreams are more real than what is right in front of me, more meaningful than superficial interactions and empty experiences.

Today I celebrate the imagination and all of it’s delights and horrors.
I hope that you soar on the wings of your dreams.

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.

We settled on a brown color, though which brown I did not know. I like bold change, and so I left the salon with dark brown hair…and I adore it. It is just the change I need to feel like a character again. When I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror I hardly recognize myself…I am a natural blondie after all. The other day I was thinking about this change, and although it is only superficial, had me thinking about more internal matters.

Noticing the stark contrast of my pale skin and the dark hair, I began to think about how white and black are perceived through symbolism. Very often the connotation is good vs. evil, and so I decided to create an image with that theme in mind. I used my hair to my advantage in this self-portrait, allowing it to pull me in one direction while my white dress pulled in another. So often we feel this pull: good/evil, life/death, right/wrong.

To create the image I photographed it on my patio, as I so often do, using my neutral wall as a backdrop. My hair was just dark enough against that gray color to isolate it and cut it out from the background to place it on one I photographed when I was in India a week or so ago. I started this shooting process by flinging my upper body forward with my hair to capture that portion. Afterwards, I began moving the dress behind me and capturing that movement.

Mind you, when I say “dress” I really mean “bed sheet”, as that is one of my favorite costumes. It is versatile, simple, and very inexpensive…my kind of costume! No matter how many dresses I buy, I always go back to different colored bed sheets as my favorite of all. There are so many possibilities with them!

Finally I knew that I needed a dust/dirt effect in my final image. I also knew that I needed to photograph something light for the dust on the dress and something dark for the dust on the hair. That was when I decided to photograph just one handful of “dust” – or in this case I used baking flour – and then invert the color when I needed to make it darker. By adding contrast to that shot, the background became darker while the flour became whiter, making it easier to isolate the flour from the background.

To put it simpler: They are beginnings. They are life. They are rebirth.

This end of another year does not symbolize the end of one thing as much as it does the beginning of another. And with all beginnings, it is best to start fresh with some introspection and self-love. It is best to move forward with yourself on your side, because too many of us play for another team. It is best to begin anew with dreams and hopes, and to put our losses to rest.

We have learned together and grown together. We have journeyed long and far and have discovered parts of ourselves we never knew existed. We challenged ourselves and pushed and pulled from others, and did our best to be the best, or at least the best we can hope for within ourselves. That is why I love you all. Accountability, friendship, and love.

I feel so fortunate to close this year out having learned about myself and about others. I have seriously redefined my goals in life. I am no longer satisfied with being a photographer. I want to make a real difference, and so a single word cannot capture what I hope to be. I want to be inspired by all things, naturally and beautifully, as it can be. I want to find my voice so that I may raise it up and stand for something bigger than my own vision. I want to give my imagination legs to stand on, and then wings to soar upon, that I may see the world from a cloud that I built with my own two hands.

As I looked back at this year, I found that the things I did, the “successes” and “failures”, were hardly a thought in my mind. I found it difficult to remember the traveling I did, or the pictures I created, so much as I could remember the lessons I learned while doing those things. Life is so often not about the things we do, but how we choose to look back on them. How they impact us in the future.

1. Give yourself a gift EVERY DAY.

   You are so much more worthy than you know. You are impactful and bright and you can change lives; the first life you should change is your own. Recognize your impact, your wants, your needs. Recognize your capacity for change, and then exact that change. Give yourself something every day that symbolizes that control you have over your world. Wake up to watch the sunrise. Treat yourself to a cookie. Write yourself a card and hide it. Go see a movie. Eat well. Smile at random. Count your successes, no matter how small. And above all, remember how worthy your own happiness is.

2. Forgive yourself before it is too late.

   We want to be better. We want to succeed. We want to push past our barriers. And sometimes, despite our best efforts, we simply do not manage everything we hope for. In those times, forgive yourself before it becomes too hard to do. I had my fair share of lazy days. Days when I watched TV all day. Days when I didn’t want to leave the house, or talk to anyone. Days when I felt inferior to other people, days when I didn’t think I could compete, and days when I just needed a rest. And I realized this year that it’s okay to not be the person you are aiming to be. Everyone needs to recharge and reset. It is okay to take a step back from that hustle and just exist. Forgive yourself now before guilt comes knocking. Let yourself be happy. Take breaks. Be free.

   3. You are a work-in-progress, yet you already possess the tools you  need.

   Two things happen all-too-often, perhaps due to our nature. One is that we constantly feel the need to be better, and the other is that we doubt our ability to do so. Remember this: no one expects you to be perfect. You are usually your own worst critic. Be okay with being something less than perfect – that is always more interesting anyway. Live through your flaws. Identify them. Try to grow. And remember, in the midst of those growing pains, that you do have the ability to fix yourself. You have all the tools you need. No one can give them to you. You simply have to search deeper.

   4. You have a gift to give the world – do not keep it to yourself.

   A great friend once told me, when I was refusing to release a picture about 5 years ago, that I have a gift to give the world and not sharing it was to keep that gift to myself. I rolled my eyes. I thought she was being ridiculous – after all, I’m not some crazy narcissistic person who thinks my art is so great. But you know what – she was right. And she wasn’t just talking about me. She was talking about everyone. Every single person has a gift to give the world. It might not be a gift for every single person, but consider this hugely important idea: When you give a piece of yourself, there is someone out there who needs to receive it, and they often will. You never know how you will positively impact someone’s life, so do not keep your gifts to yourself. They are too precious to be hidden away. Embrace them. Know your quirks. Reveal them. Share them openly. Be generous.

   We are cracked. We are flawed. We are full of power and energy that we cannot begin to know. We can only hope to search for it, to embrace pieces of it, and to use it to unlock our passion.

I have been creating so many images lately with heavy compositing, and I was loving that experimentation. I have no plans on stopping, either. But in that haze of image editing I decided to try for a simpler composition and shoot in my favorite spot in the forest. I went with my friend Kyna to take some photos. We had tea and chocolate and then sat in the ivy, burning candles and playing with wax.

Earlier in the day we visited a local Goodwill and found many books for the photo shoot. I bought about 25 of them and decided to make do with those. One that we found, which was extra special, was a huge anthology of Shakespeare’s works, with illustrations. It was incredible timing, as I was fashioning the character of the image around Ophelia.

When we got to the forest I opened up the Shakespeare book and turned to Hamlet where I found the page you see in the final image. I put a vine in her hair and posed her quite similar to the woman in the book, and decided to go for a play on characters: one mimicking the other.

To read is to escape; to become someone else; to wish for a new life. So much of reading is becoming, not just imagining. We can feel what they feel, and in doing so, become those characters, even if for a brief time. Escape, release, and imagination. These emotions are what books are made of. Enchantment.

Who are your favorite storybook characters?

It was stunning, and I had an idea for it a while before I ever got there. However, I didn’t know I was going that day, and I ended up having to use whatever I happened to have with me. Unsure of what the angle restrictions would be, I decided to scope things out and then start shooting when the sun went down. On the beach, that always leaves very little time to shoot given that the horizon line is not obstructed by anything; so essentially, once the sun goes down, you only have minutes to get the shot.

There were also many other photographers there shooting everything from fashion to engagement shoots, so the advantage to shooting later was that the moment I pulled my camera out, everyone else was packing theirs in. I had the whole place to myself for a blissful 20 minutes.

After creating the image of the tower, I decided to shoot a sequel…a fairytale gone wrong, in which she ends up on the ground after jumping from the tower. In the first image I had imagined a fairytale character trapped in the tower, so she fashions herself a dress from her bed sheet and uses a rope to jump/fly/float down to the bottom.

It was incredibly inspiring to use props that I happened to have on hand. Rope and a bed sheet were all that I had in the car, so I used what I had to create. The bed sheet truly made the perfect dress for my vision and I was so thrilled that I didn’t feel held back in any way by not having expensive props. I hope you enjoy the resulting images!

Do you ever shoot with whatever you have laying around? Do you ever challenge yourself to shoot minimally and see what your imagination does? I challenge you!