On My Mind

Hello, internet.  It’s been a while.  I’m not gonna lie.  The last year and a half has been a whirlwind of awful.  I wish I could say it’s all better now, but it’s so not.  If you’re not into stories of personal drama or if you’re particularly squeamish, feel free to skip on down to the photo-sharing portion of the blog.  I will not judge or be offended.  It’s really okay.  In fact, I’ll share the photos before the dramatic stuff so you don’t even have to scroll on by.  Here’s what I’ve been working on lately, after a loooong break from creative photography.  I hope you enjoy.

So, if you’re still here, I’m betting you’re the curious and iron-stomached type.  Welcome to the rest of the blog.  I’m happy to have you.

I made these images as a nod to my experience in the world of psychology.  I was a psych major in college, and I remember feeling so special and excited when, in one of my classes, the professor showed us a set of Rorschach inkblots and made us promise never to show them to anyone else (so they wouldn’t be influenced if they needed to be evaluated with them one day).  These are sort of a reverse inkblot where I’m the ink and the darkness of the tunnel behind me is the paper.  I’ll leave the interpretation of the shapes up to you.

I also happen to have a much more personal connection with psychology.  If you know me, you probably know I’ve struggled with depression as long as I can remember.  I’ve tried lots of therapy and various pharmaceutical interventions, but to no avail.  Sometimes things seemed to get a little better on their own, but in February of 2016, my depression got a turbo booster shot. 

After almost ten years of marriage, my husband and I decided to try to have a baby.  In December, I found out I was pregnant, but in February, I found out I wasn’t any more.  Everyone has their own reaction to a miscarriage.  I was broken.  I’ll probably always be at least a little broken.  We had worked so hard to come to a decision about expanding our family, and it felt like we were doing the right thing.  When our baby was taken away from us, I didn’t know what to think or how to make sense of it.  If there’s a God, and He wanted me to have kids, why would He put me through the process of deciding to have children only to crush me so quickly? (I realize not everyone thinks about life and death and spirituality this way.  This is just my limited understanding.) 

Though the time to announce our happy news was getting close, we hadn’t told many people we were expecting.  So, when the miscarriage happened, it felt like I couldn’t talk to anyone about it.  It didn’t feel fair to force my friends and family to engage with such a heavy topic out of nowhere, and I didn’t feel like I could trust many people to react with the compassion I needed in my fragile state.  And maybe that’s not fair to the people in my life who would’ve liked to know what was going on, but I wasn’t ready to make myself even more vulnerable.  I wanted to hold on to what little control I had left.  Instead, I sought out some professional help once again and began to work through my grief mostly in private.

After I had recovered physically, things started slowly to morph into a new normal of post-pregnancy life.  For a little while, I felt fine physically and was only (ha, only) heartbroken.  But then the physical pain started.  I’ll spare you the graphic details.  At first, my doctors thought it was a simple infection.  I could take a course of antibiotics and be cured.  But the first course didn’t work, so they prescribed a second, and then a third, and eventually I had taken 6 rounds of antibiotics.  But guess what?  My pain had not improved.  In fact, it had spread and gotten worse.  I started to seek out various specialists who might be able to help me solve this puzzle, but with each one I visited, I ended up with another set of normal tests.  I’ve lost track of how many doctors I’ve seen now, but I know it’s more than a dozen, and still, no one knows why I’ve been in pain every day for the last ten months. 

I know there are plenty of people with chronic pain for whom ten months is just a drop in the bucket.  I’m afraid I’m becoming one of those people.  There’s a certain kind of psychological torture in not knowing what’s causing this pain and what I can expect in the future.  Right now, the future doesn’t look too bright.  I can’t predict whether we’ll have other children, and the pain doesn’t seem to want to budge.  I’m not sure whether I’ll ever be happy and healthy.  There are no promises.  Right now, all I can do is work when I can, enjoy what I can, and try to make it through each day with as much sanity as I can cling on to.  Sometimes art helps.

Except, these days I haven’t had much mental energy to focus on art.  I feel responsible for everything that’s happened, from the miscarriage to whatever this illness is and my inability to recover from it.  It doesn’t help that some of my doctors have blamed me, too (at least for the illness part).  I’ve asked for forgiveness, for guidance, for mercy, but so far it doesn’t feel like I’ve been granted any of those things.  Though I’ve worked hard to regain some peace through therapy, yoga, self-help books, prayer, and meditation, I haven’t made enough progress to be able to focus on thinking creatively.  This is my first attempt to create something meaningful in a long, long time.  I hope it won’t be the last.

The End/Beginning

Whoa.  So I realize I kind of fell off the map after I finished my 365 photo project.  That was really never my intention.  I meant to end things with a bang, meaning lots of facebook posts, flickr commentary, and even a big blog post about how it felt to have accomplished a whole year of photography and what I thought I'd learned in the process.  Things did not go as planned, however, and I found myself scrambling at the end of 2013 with unexpected travel and serious health news in the family.  It didn't seem right to be shouting from the rooftops how awesome it felt to have accomplished such a huge personal goal, so I kept the media blitz to a couple quiet announcements for those who had been so encouraging through the whole process.

Now that plans are underway for addressing the health stuff and the travel has slowed down, I wanted to take some time to update those out there who might be wondering "What the heck happened and when will there be more photos??"  Some people have even asked me whether I'll be starting up a new photo-a-day project soon.  The answer to that is a big fat "NO!"  While I still think about photography all the time, I have no desire to get myself into the situation again where I wake up every morning with a sense of doom and foreboding.  Don't get me wrong, the 365 was a lot of fun at times, and I'm so glad I did it, but the pressure I put on myself to create something I could be proud to post on the internet every day was a huge burden that I don't wish to take up again.  I'm much more content having the time to think through ideas, make plans to execute them, and wait for the appropriate time to do so. :)

For those who don't follow my flickr photo stream and only read my very sporadic blog posts (I don't know who you might be, but thanks for checking in), here's my final photo from my 365 project:

This one is meaningful to me because it was taken in the same location as my photo from day 1.  I wrote a big spiel over on flickr about how awesome my husband was for putting up with me through the whole project and for consenting to do this final photo shoot with me in the freezing cold.  I sincerely doubt whether I would've gotten through the whole year without his love and support.

Since the fateful day of January 31, 2013, I have been itching to get back out and create new images, but I've also had some other exciting developments to share with you.  For starters, I entered a contest on Flickr before Christmas, and one of my photos was chosen as one of 12 winners from over 63,000 entries!  It was so encouraging to put something out there that I really like and had a fun time shooting and get such a positive response.  Here's my winning entry:

And here's where you can see a gallery of all the winners: Flickr12Days (hopefully available by 2/16/14)

In other big news, I'll be participating in an international juried show of female artists in the second half of February and the first half of March.  Included in this will be a talk about artistic process given by myself and one other artist.  To help illustrate what I do, I created a video showing the highlights of my editing process in fast forward.  Now I just have to think about how to fill the rest of my speaking time with non-pretentious-but-still-impressive-sounding artsy talk. :)

Hopefully I'll have some news to share about how the show and the talk go once those are under way.  After that, I'll be the featured artist in a local college's annual art show.  I'm excited to see the work that the students have to share with the community and to get some feedback from them about what I do.  I'm determined to make blogging a bigger part of my artistic outreach, so check back for updates about all these fun events!

Didn't You Know? All Photographers Can Fly

Sadly, this just isn't so.  I'm not even a particularly good jumper.  However, I recently threw out the idea of writing some posts answering the "How'd you do that?" type questions I sometimes get about my daily photos.  I thought I'd start by explaining how I make myself appear to float (or levitate, as you'll see it called on sites like flickr), since that's probably the most confusing technique I use to people who don't do this sort of thing on a daily basis. :-P  I certainly didn't come up with this idea.  When I decided I wanted to try it, I took to the great interwebs to try and learn how it was done.  Some things I found were helpful and some were not.  Anyway, I hope this is at least somewhat informative and/or amusing.

So, what sort of equipment does one need to achieve this effect?  Well, I'll tell you.

First, of course, you need to choose a setting where you'll be doing your levitating.  It also helps to have some sort of costume that helps explain what you're doing floating in this particular setting.  Obviously you don't need to wear anything special, but it helps to tell a story. :)  It also helps to do a little bit of acting (which is where the ridiculous facial expression comes in).  You've got to sell it, people!  

Also important are the objects on which you will balance yourself.  In this case they were a large rock (which you see in the final image) and a chair (which you don't see, but we'll get to that in a minute).  You levitate with only one object (or none, if you want to catch a photo of yourself jumping in mid air).  In this case I used the rock because it was part of the story I was telling and I sort of thought it would look cool if it appeared that my head was the only thing keeping me off the ground.

A tripod is a useful way to get your camera in the proper position, but if you've got a more efficient way, then go for it!  Last but not least, a remote control is invaluable in this process, as it allows you to focus the camera without being behind the camera and also lets you control when the picture is taken.

As you can see here, I eventually changed my mind about wanting to step off the large rock into mid air in favor of resting my head on the rock as if I were sleeping.  Unfortunately, being in this position meant I wasn't exactly where I needed to be so that the camera could focus on my head.  Hence, another ridiculous affectation.  We do what we must for creativity's sake.  :)

By the way, this is what a finished version of the original idea could have looked like:

So, once I had my preferred pose figured out, I took a bunch of shots to try to get a position that would be interesting and really sell the whole floating thing.

One last thing I needed before I could pack up and go home was a picture of my background setting without myself or the chair in it.  That was a little tricky in this situation because it was late afternoon and the light on the background behind me was constantly changing.  Thankfully I noticed this and was able to take several background shots through the course of my photo shoot.

Having a picture of the plain background meant that later, in Photoshop, I could open the file with myself in the picture and the one with just the background, layer the one of me on top of the background shot, and then erase the pixels making up the chair, showing the empty background underneath, like so.

Once that was accomplished, I just added a little extra Photoshop magic (a whole other story, trust me) to make it look more interesting, and there you have the final product.  Yippee!

Whoa.  That turned out to be a little more long-winded than I expected, but I hope it was helpful.  I'm happy to consider requests for other how-tos.  If you care to, feel free to check out the rest of my work here and let me know what you think!  Thanks for stopping by. :)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mclemm1/