One week in and I can’t think of a better way to be spending my summer. The mornings are cool and dark and peaceful, my editing sessions are filled with tea and music, and my afternoons are for working. Evenings bring walks and yoga and cooking up new recipes. Nights bring Star Trek and reading.

When I began creating images years ago, I was just out of college (technically still in the very end semester), and I had nothing to my name. I had no money. I was moving and unsettled and had no place to call home. I took a job as a receptionist and saved everything that I possibly could, eating lots of Ramen soup and paying off my student loans extremely diligently. One year in to being out of school, I had paid off my student loans and I was moving toward this dream career.

I remember waking at 5am each morning to shoot before work and editing when no one was looking throughout the day. I remember how exhilarating it was to have the freedom to create; to come up with a new idea everyday made me feel powerful. I also burned out on it, as we all do at times, and I’ve found balance since then. With this July challenge brings memories of that time in my life, when I had never taken pictures before so everything was new. Everything had never been done before, in my world.

During those times, because money was so tight, I had a strict rule for myself: buy nothing. I used hand-me-down equipment, a tripod from a thrift store, and anything I could find around me. I remember once dragging a shopping cart up the stairs to my second floor apartment, getting stuck and pinned on the way there. I remember gathering branches. I remember finding old fabric in an alley. I remember my utter amazement, and subsequent empowerment, I felt at realizing the great many uses of a bed sheet.

We don’t need fancy things to create. Our imaginations are free. We are free to use them. And they can set us free.

Today I celebrate how wonderful it is to be a CREATOR in this beautiful world. To see the things that others don’t; to see potential where others see roadblocks. Is that not what makes an Artist? Seeing something different in the world and expressing that view in your own unique iteration?

Today I photographed the most ordinary items: a rope, an old oar I’ve had for ages, a candle holder…and I created from that. Can I afford more now than I could then? Yes. Do I feel that I need to spend money to prove myself? To make myself feel more ‘professional’? No. So here I create in my happy world of my own building, where rarely does anything cost more than $10 and I can exist blissfully inside my imagination.

There’s lots of room in here, if you want to join.

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.

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?