I declared 2018 my year of NO travel, and that will be true…after June. So far I’ve spent a month away in India, Sri Lanka, and Florida (that sounds a lot less exciting after the other two). Soon I’ll be heading to Tennessee and Wisconsin before going to Greece and Maine. That’s all by the third week of March.

With that pace it is extremely difficult to keep up routines. I find myself in airports, hotels, Airbnbs, grandma’s houses. I move so quickly from one place to the next that they barely have time to stick in my memories. When your circumstances change, how can you keep a routine? I do my best. Yoga everyday, even if it’s only for 15 minutes. Lots of water. Emails every morning. Reading everyday. Outside of that, nothing is the same.

I’m home for a few days in between trips, exhausted from traveling, body aching, but all I wanted was to create – freely, without interruption. Instead of pushing myself beyond what is wise into the cold for a photo shoot, I searched my computer for long-forgotten images. There I found the spark of something interesting. I didn’t know what it was, just that it could be.

I found an underwater image that struck me as graceful and full of emotion. I had already edited those up for the most part, wasn’t interested in redoing them. I wanted something new. I started to look at the image differently, thinking that the bubbles looked like stars. And so I began creating what I knew could be something interesting. Watch the editing process here:

It is wildly important to act on our creative urges, in whatever way is available to us, in whatever way feels right. I find it necessary to keep motivated. So often we talk about what is recommend to stay healthy: good food, exercise, fresh air, etc. But something I vehemently believe we need to add to that list is creativity. An outlet for our imagination. And I would put that before most else.

How often do you exercise your imagination, release your creativity and make something for yourself? 

I’ve spent a long time letting go of the word “good” in this context. I bet everyone here has had the experience of not creating because what you were making didn’t seem good enough. Now that I’ve had some distance from my process of creating, from my body of work, I can see much more clearly. There are works I create that are good and bad. Some that will remain, others that will be forgotten. In the moment they all feel so important, and they are. But what is important is not how they are judged, but how they made you feel while creating them.

When was the last time you did
something completely for yourself?

Do you notice a change in your health
when you set your imagination free?

“Moonrise”, February 2018

Model: Sara Silkin
Dress: Michelle Hebert

Today the image was inspired by the incomparable ParkeHarrisons, Joel Robison, and my long-standing obsession with umbrellas. Ever since 2010 I’ve felt very connected to the umbrella as a symbol. I watched as most everyone in my life sought shelter from their own personal storms – life, all of it’s hardships, fears, anxieties – they wanted so much to be protected from them. I wanted the opposite; not always because it was fun, but because I had this unending feeling in my stomach telling me to embrace what is uncomfortable.

I remember being in Paris and running along the water as a storm broke out. I was filled with joy like never before. I wanted to splash in every puddle, to be soaked, to feel it in my bones. I looked back and my friend was huddled by a tree yelling at me to stop and to keep dry. I had never felt so disconnected.

I remember being in Amsterdam with thunder bursting all around. I looked at my friend and asked her to go outside with me, and she did. We ran to the nearby docks and sat on their edge, feet in the water, rain pouring down, and we both still look back at that moment as one of the most important in our friendship.

Everyday that it rains here at home I can’t help but run outside. Even my husband comes to get me if I haven’t showed myself at the start, just to make sure I know. I love the rain, the storm clouds. When I give things a rating from 1-10, I simply say “clouds” if it is off-the-charts good. But not those white, fluffy clouds; I mean the evil storm clouds.

When I make a decision, I ask myself if I am carrying an umbrella or not. If I am, I know I am playing it safe. I know I need to let go of what keeps me sheltered to fully immerse myself in the experience.

Today I noticed an umbrella in my car. I asked how long it has been there – 3 years, I was told. I hadn’t noticed. I pulled it out and opened it up, and to my delight, every bar was bent and every clasp broken. I smiled, threw it in the trash, and created this image.

Come hell or high water, I’m in this life entirely.

How many people live inside of us? How many versions of ourselves are waiting to be born, grow their voice, and take control of what they (and they alone) know is coming? Some of us wait and then struggle fiercely against the loss of that person we have known so intimately. For me, she dances away easily as though off to a place she’ll never come back from. I don’t mind watching her go. But others of us hold on to our skin so tightly, suffocating it, willing it to please, please stay where you are and be the same and never change.

It hurts us to become someone else, especially when who we always thought we would be is a distant memory kept alive by pure hope. We feel our skin unzipping to that slow uneasy click, click, click and we reach to hold it together. Our compulsions are too empty of meaning.

Yesterday I started editing some images I had shot a few weeks back with no notion of if they would work out or not. I pulled old stock images I had taken years ago combined with one that I purchased online as well and started playing. My friend Dave Junion is always telling me to play in my craft. It is too easy to be too serious. We put such pressure on ourselves to create something good that we lose sight of the fact that what is good now won’t be good later. And, that if we continue to create what we feel is good we will never progress to what is better.

That said, yesterday I played. I played from morning until night and then this morning again, working on this image, not caring if it turned into something or not. I followed my vision, made a few changes, and experimented. All-in-all this edit took a few hours which I recorded and condensed into one minute, so chunks of the process are missing. Notably, the cutting of the various figures to fit into the scene.

This image is called “Contact”. My fascination with two worlds colliding has been growing and growing ever since I started reading Myst. Have any of you read it? It was my husband’s favorite book series (and game) for a long time and I never got around to digesting it. Now it is all I can think about. The premise of the book being that there is an underground race of people who can create new worlds. Pretty much right up my ally.

I hope you enjoy this speed edit! Let me know if there is anything else you’d like to see me share!

Image: “Contact”, self-portrait (x6)
Music: “An Old Picture” by Above Envy

We’re back in the editing room today for White Wall Wednesday! I swear each video gets longer and longer and I have to work harder to cut it down. But that’s because I’m feeling so excited to share, share, share! I have a new energy about me recently that has been brought on by change. A new series I’ve dedicated my year to has been fulfilling, so creating these videos feels like a step back into my “normal” process, which is nice to feel. My world is balanced by creating new work that I haven’t shown anyone and sharing more than ever about my usual workflow.

I asked you last week what types of things you’d like to see in editing, so this week we cover:

1. How to add fog.
2. How to cut hair off of a background.
3. A more in-depth look at color through curves.

Have a crazy swell week and remember to take a renewed sense of inspiration with you in everything you do today. Smile when you don’t want to smile, hug someone you think may need it. Why not, right? And promote passion – always, promote passion.

Last week I was in Chicago where I taught a class about storytelling and gave a lecture about “permission” and it was an absolute pleasure to be there with that group. I left feeling energized and inspired and ready to take on the world! Since I’ve been back, I really have! I’ve been making more connections with charity organizations, setting to-do lists and marking everything off, and feeling generally productive yet calm. What a way to feel. Sometimes I forget that all of that good feeling is harnessable and that sometimes it takes a mental shift. Hooray!

While in Chicago I photographed this image! I have certainly seen large key images before. I recognize the key to be a universal symbol as well as one that is easy to grab onto and create with. After all, it is timeless and beautiful and textured. What photographer wouldn’t love that?! Well, I can think of a lot, but this one does! I’ve created large key images before, but this one was special because of who I created it with.

My friend Jane Love came and modeled and she is always an inspiration, so I dedicate the finished image to her. Not to mention to all of the people I connected with. I felt like we were all unlocking things within ourselves that I hope will only go deeper as time goes on.

I wanted to share how this image was put together since it was shot for a class. This isn’t a portfolio piece, but it sure was a blast to create, and with really minimal elements, too! I created two GIFs because it was a two step process. Originally I was going to try and keep the subject on the same background she was photographed on, but decided the ground wasn’t dynamic enough (I have a thing with mowed grass) and so I moved her to a more wild looking New Zealand field.

What have you done recently that made you feel connected, inspired, or motivated?

Whenever I see a composited image that doesn’t seem to quite work – my own photographs included – it is always because I am distracted by the editing itself. Case in point is an image I’m working on right now, in which I am editing someone half underwater, but the water line is just too distracting – too white, too big, too in your face. It isn’t blended properly. And because of that, I notice the editing before the concept.

One way that I deal with removing distractions from my edits is to know the order that I like to edit in, and to finish that stage before I move on to the next. My first step is always the actual compositing – literally stitching together various images so that they blend well.

When I was editing this image of my friend Jen Brook in a chateau in France, I had to edit on about eight other images photographed all around her to build out the room she is standing in. Each piece required that I do a couple of things before moving on. First is to blend using a big, fuzzy (soft, 0% hardness) brush to erase where the harsh lines of the edge of the image are so that there were no mistakes where the image was blended. Next was to match up exactly where that new piece of the picture had to go on the underlying image so that everything lined up. This often requires warping (Edit–>Transform–>Warp) so that I can maneuver each piece of the new image into place. Once everything lines up, I click that layer on and off (using the eyeball symbol in the Layers palette) to make sure I’m not missing any pieces. Finally, I retouch the color or exposure of the new piece that has been added, in case the color shifted slightly or the light did.

Once I have all of my images stitched together, and only after they ALL blend perfectly, I move on to lighting. The most common pitfall of compositing is thinking that it stops at blending the separate images together. Compositing must often go beyond stitching because when we enhance light, we take the viewer’s gaze away from certain areas and put it on others in the frame. I like to drastically enhance light, thus doing things like darkening the background and highlighting my subject. In this case below, I selected only the background, feathered my selection (in this case it was about 30px), and then darkened that area using curves and pulling down from the highlights only. This allowed the highlights on the curtains to become dark while maintaining some of the mid-tones, which would include her hair, so that they were not as greatly affected. The result is a more natural fall-off of light.

Working in light and color is rarely necessary in compositing, but it can drastically help the believability of the image. For example, in the above image, by adding blue to the shadows, and by skewing those blacks to be gray, I created a more muddied look in the shadows. This allowed the image to blend together more by taking away some of the sharper details in those areas and creating a painterly look instead. By changing the color of the dress to better fit the color palette, the viewer immediately sees a greater connection between all pieces of the final image. The colors all work together, the light is motivated and draws the eye to a certain part of the frame, and the compositing has no stitching flaws.

Even though my methods may change and evolve over time, my theory on compositing remains the same. I stitch, I enhance or change light, and I enhance or change color. Those three items, in that order, follow me through every edit that I work on.

Are there any go-to methods that you use to create your images, composited or not? Share them below!

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 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?

I created an image of a blue origami crane not too long ago, and accidentally saved over that high-res Photoshop file as a smaller image before I backed it up. Totally, 100%, stupidly my fault. I was upset about it. I wasn’t even sure of what to do, since a gallery had already expressed interest in showing it. It wasn’t just me I had let down. So I broke the news, and everyone moved on without a second thought, and I decided to not let it upset me.

What good is doing what you love if you dwell on the bad? Bad things will happen whether we want them to or not, just as the good will. The only difference from one life to another is how we choose to see those situations. I’ve seen people with almost nothing to live off of smile and laugh as though they had everything; and opposite, I have seen people with everything who are miserable. I like to think of life as an illusion. We make it up as we go, and our reactions to the world shape how we understand the world.

This might seem a bit dramatic for a lost file, but that event simply sparked change in me to live life to a greater degree: to care less about the truly unimportant and to care more about what matters. I made a decision in this instance to stop thinking about how sad I was to lose the picture, and instead create a new one that I love. I thought about recreating the image exactly, and I still might attempt it, but for the moment I was freshly inspired and decided to go a different direction.

I put more story into the new picture, adding a Mother Nature theme and titling the image “Empty Nest” to bring home the idea that we all lose something, and it is our job to see beauty in the darkness. There is always beauty waiting to be discovered, and one could argue that there is always darkness, too. We have this tendency to see the darkness all around us, so if we search for beauty we are always traveling, looking for light, and experiencing all the goodness there is in the world.

Do not push away the darkness; shine a light on it.

These are 5 ways that could help in overcoming adversity:

1. Let yourself feel it…

Let yourself be angry, sad, upset, etc…It is natural and healthy to feel emotions. But don’t allow those negative emotions to define you.

2. What if someone were watching…

React to situations the way you would react if someone you didn’t know were watching. We have a tendency to become complacent in how we react to the world because it becomes routine. But what if you had to make a good impression? How would you react?

3. There is always something out there…

Terrible things happen in this world, a million times worse than losing a silly file. No matter what the situation, you are at the center of it, and it can feel very dramatic. Remember that when you do move on, there will be more to discover and be impassioned by.

4. Channel your emotion…

Learn to see your emotions as inspiration for your art. Turn that emotion into an image, or whatever your artform is, and be inspired by yourself.

5. Know who you want to be…

Write down 5 words that describe the person you want to be in the future. This is something to work toward. How would that person react to the situation?

INSPIRED
KIND
LOVING
AMAZED
CENTERED

What are your 5 words?