What is more magical than our ability to create? To pull something out of thin air, to empower our imagination to be wild. Is there anything more beautiful than pure expression? My world fuels itself on ideas, inspiration, and creating. When I am out of sync it is because I’m not freely creating whatever my mind might have in store that day. Not that I create randomly, but that I allow my imagination to breath so that when it comes time to create, I am ready.

I’ve been so closed off from inspiration this year for many reasons. I can always find an idea at the drop of a hat, but an idea that fulfills me is a whole other thing. I wanted to take time to cultivate that intense creativity while I am on a break from traveling, so for the month of July I am going to create a photo, video and blog post every day.

You might be thinking that creating every day will only stifle my creativity. I tend to agree – forcing creativity can be painful and unfulfilling. For me, giving some constraints with an easy-to-identify end time is a good thing. A month is a short time, and I know I can fully dedicate myself to it. I want to learn how to create better videos and this month will help me. I want to get the ideas out of my head that have been building up, and this will help me. I want to write more and document my days, and this will help me.

Each day certainly won’t yield something great. After all, I’m largely only giving myself mornings to do all of this considering I do still have jobs/tasks/other activities planned. But for each morning, I will dedicate myself entirely to my craft.

This month I will be working on a Creativity Challenge to release at a Pay-What-You-Can price in August in case anyone else wants to try out a challenge like this…assuming I make it through! After all, if I can’t be an example I probably shouldn’t be helping other people along!

Wish me luck, comrades!

And remember…

“There is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique.
And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.”
— Martha Graham

…so create, because our uniqueness is a gift that I believe makes life richer when explored.

My dear friend Dave Brosha invited me to his house to speak at his inaugural event Land & See, combining landscape and portrait photography lessons laced with inspiration. It was fantastically awesome. Before I left for Prince Edward Island (I totally get why people vacation there!) I received an email about participating in Photo Plus this year in New York City. One thing that the email mentioned was that they were looking for bold images rich with color and that potentially focuses on technology in some way. Well, I wasn’t sure what to send in that would fit, so I decided to use that as inspiration for a shoot. I decided to re-do a concept I’ve played with before and have some fun with technology…which is probably not in any way what they had in mind, but nonetheless…

My favorite piece of technology is our imagination. It is endless and vast and intelligent, which one could argue makes the perfect machine. In other ways our imagination is nothing like a machine. It is random and magical and absurd, yet aren’t all of the best things? I wanted to make the imagination come to life while pairing it with our perception of “technology” – wires and gadgets. So when I began thinking about those ideas, I began creating orb pictures. They remain, for me personally, the best representation of imagination that I can muster.

The whole class pitched in with picking flowers and giving me hugs and holding the ball and all manner of lovely things, and by the end of the shoot I felt confident that I had what I needed.

A few hours of editing later and I had found a color scheme that I loved. I sent it to my friend who told me the colors were not good, which, for my stubborn mind, meant that they were great, and here we are! My interpretation of imagination turned machine.

Remember to start your machine up from time to time. Don’t let it get rusty. Use it often and treat it well. It is the greatest gift, and we possess the power to make it do anything.

Modeled by the double threat photographer and model Lexi Parks.
Assisted by the kindest man & fantastic photographer, Wayne Simpson.

I’ve heard people counter the idea that with imagination we can create anything we want. Someone once said to me:

“I know that imagination is nice, but it won’t make the gray clouds outside go away.”

We can see through the darkness if we bring our own light. We can imagine and create and believe and see the world as we want to see it. If I didn’t believe in this, I would not be living the life I am living, and that is a life I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. We build our own fortune. We carve our own book of words to live by. We write the song of our life.

Art allows us to manifest these desires and visions. It allows us to spread our messages. It gives us power where once we felt nothing. It gives us hope where once we saw despair. And above all else, it gives us a voice. It allows us to speak through universal words that contain a thousand different meanings.

Imagination is the life-blood that flows through the veins of an artist. I believe all people to be artists. We do not manifest our art in the same ways. We do not all see the artist in ourselves. But it is there, sometimes sleeping silently, but always there, waiting. It is up to us to wake it.

What is your relationship with IMAGINATION?

This is an idea I am in love with. Imagine how differently we would all see each other if we looked at strangers and saw bodies filled with potential. We all carry a story inside of us, a veritable rose garden of beautiful ideas that, if shared, would brighten the world.

Imagination, for so many of us, is our life blood. It is what carries us through the world, gives us strength and courage to be different, and reaffirms our choices when we are in doubt. It is what defines us, it is what makes us whole, and it is what we so badly want to share with others.

Yesterday I was thinking about these ideas, abstract as they may be, and wanted to make them more concrete. I wanted to represent them in an image. My first thought was of imagination as blood, since it feels so necessary for survival, and what the scene would look like should someone’s imagination leak out of them. But then I realized that imagination does not simply “leak”, it explodes. I had a vision of red cloth folding around my face and bursting up the wall. Then I thought about roses, and the symbolism of something in bloom, and how much a garden must be tended to in order to thrive, much like our imaginations. The combination struck a chord in me, and I went out to create.

This is my challenge to you: 

Create an image with a blank wall and a piece of fabric.

I want to see your imagination explode, theoretically. Let’s show the world what can be done with the most limited of resources and a lot of heart. 

“The Rose Garden” is a self-portrait taken February 2015 in my bedroom.

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!

So often artists strive to put that abstract feeling into something concrete, and that is the challenge of someone trying to share their soul – it is always growing and changing. It is blooming into something bigger all the time and to share it fully is to kill it. And so we create with the kind of vigor that allows us to grow and change, and in doing so, we feed our uniqueness all the time.

There are ideas I think about that would shock people and upset others, that would disturb some and intrigue some. And I keep some of it to myself not because I am guarded but because I want the mystery for myself. I am on a journey with myself and that is the only company I can always count on. So I keep something for that special place within that is always searching. My imagination is a fantasy land that I get to explore, and it is a beautiful thing.

Take what it is that makes you so incredible and explore it. Seek to understand it but never do so fully. It is the place you can never visit, the thing you can never touch, the sound that you can’t quite hear. It draws you along your life journey. It inspires. It beckons. Always explore who you are and why you are. Fight for what makes you beautiful. You are infinitely beautiful.

I took that inspiration, and one of the birds that I photographed that morning, into a story idea. I felt, so much that morning, like my imagination was being freed. I felt as though those birds symbolized so much, and I wanted to put that into a photograph. I went to work creating this picture with origami birds.

I had never created origami before, which is very challenging, and even more so when using thick construction paper, but I made it work after twenty minutes of frustration. When my little blue crane emerged, who I lovingly named Cranium, we went shooting. The shoot itself was very calming. I kept finding myself staring into the distance smiling at nothing in particular. I was just happy to be creating.

The song in the video (Conquering Heights by James Dooley, courtesy of Song Freedom), seemed the perfect fit. It matched what I heard in my mind that day. I love how birds can be such a symbol of freedom, and the vibrant color of my little bluejays felt like a fairytale. I always equate that color blue with a serene and magical fairytale, and so I too felt like I was part of another world. Even shooting, in that less-than-glamorous location, I could feel I was somewhere else entirely.

I hope that you enjoy the video and that you feel inspired to free your imagination.

I can’t help but love to use butterflies in my work because of this exact sentiment. The idea of metamorphosis is so often pushed past because, well, who has time for it? Many do not have the luxury of reflecting on life and making solid changes…or at least it seems that way. It doesn’t have to take long at all, but it should happen. Because if we aren’t thinking about being someone better than who we are now, where is the growth?

This relates so well to any type of creative endeavor. For me, it’s photography. I create best when I am growing and when I understand who I am and what I want to say. I could never understand that if I didn’t take time to cocoon myself and reflect and ultimately, grow.

I will never take my best picture because each one moves me further in the direction of my dreams, which are always growing and expanding.

Just like these butterflies coming from the imagination and moving outward, so do the ideas and dreams in my mind. They spread their wings and move on to further reaches of the world to make room for more. We are always moving forward, and keeping all of those butterflies trapped within will only kill them.

So, what has all of that been for? The best thing ever.

This week I let my mind be free. I let myself stop worrying so much. I’m not even one to worry all that much, if truth be told. But when stresses pile up, my mind gets clogged. I count myself so fortunate that I wake up each morning with the sun and tell myself quietly that I have control over the decisions I make. I’ve been doing that not just in the mornings lately, but any time I feel a bit of stress or anxiety. I stop myself and simply say: “You are in control.”

This week I took two pictures that speak to me perhaps more than any others in my portfolio. I spent time conceptualizing them and working out the kinks and figuring out exactly what they mean to me, and why I should be the one to create them. When all of that thinking was finished, I waited some more. I waited until the moment felt right and my creativity was ready to sore. The images here are 100% zooms/crops of those pictures which I will be releasing over the next couple weeks.

So this week I created. I brought my dreams to life. I got back to my “creepy” side and embraced it. I went dark and sad and above all, or at least in my mind, beautiful. I created what I feel is the work that I want to move towards. I created two images that were both out of my comfort zone in some way yet still maintaining what I love about creating. And the results stretched me and pushed me and made me giggle with excitement.

I’m not saying this because I think that they are the best pictures in the world (oh gosh no) or the best I’ll ever do (we’re always growing), but for right now, and so far in my journey, I feel like I just hit a turning point.

Sometimes self-reflection and asking yourself hard questions can lead to the most amazing, beautiful, breathtaking answers. And sometimes, if we channel those answers into physical form, you create something that you can look at and know is the culmination of hard work.

So even if no one ever responds to those two images, or if people hate them, or if they are simply not to anyone’s taste…I’m perfectly okay with that. I create from my heart and soul and that is what those images are to me.

My insides out. My stories told. My imagination expanded.

 When do you create your best work?

What is your state of mind?