Bought your tickets yet?
Perused the lecture schedule to see which speakers you want to hear?
Just A Few More Days Until…
1
This Is For All The Lonely People
…thinking that life has passed them by
Days like today are never simple. Most of us, even if we know we are loved have some achey corner of our lives that remains stained with loss or regret. Most of us face our days as courageously as we can, but hold, somewhere deep inside the knowledge that we were not enough for someone, not enough to keep them from leaving us, not enough for them to treat us generously, or fairly, not enough for them to love us the way we long to be loved. Days like this give us the chance to remind others how beautiful they are to us. But they may also, unintentionally serve as days that remind us love has not treated us quite as kindly as we were taught to hope it would, and that all the saccharine sweet wishes in the world will not make even one of them taste any more like the honey that is love returned.
This is for each of you who has ever experienced the horror of having been thrown away by someone. It is for those who have been lied about, stolen from, made fun of. It is for those who remain unseen, under-appreciated, frozen by fear.
Today, may you find permission to begin forgiving yourself for those achey scars you suspect make you unloveable. May you find some small measure of permission to love yourself a bit more generously, if simply by realizing that you are not at all alone in feeling so alone. And may that in turn free you to drop your guard, if only a little, to let another venture closer where they can begin to love you too.
This Is For All The Lonely People (Remember this song by America?)
Patina Is Power
Within any visual story, patina is power. It is texture and time, shadow and age. Patina is magic worth looking for, aura worth steeping into your pictures like tea to help you, as the storyteller to create mood and add greater emotional value to your subjects.
Here is a merely hinted story, just three quick, iPhone-captured glimpses that record the beginnings of a ‘patina canvas,’ a simple, inexact practice I’ve been experimenting with for a few years now, and that is unfolding in a new iteration even now upon my rainy back yard deck. In time this deliberately ‘rain-painted’ background will provide symbolism, mystery, texture and context for many, yet-to-be-created images. I love the ‘not knowing’ and the delicious waiting to see where chance and imagination will take us.
Over the next several days/weeks, the metal star will leave its imprint, a distinct, rusted outline which may then serve as a metaphor, implying dreams, space, even nighttime.
And those nuggets of rock salt will dissolve, and in doing so help create a random-ish pattern of brighter, more intense rust splotches that should, I hope, feel somewhat like points of light, creating even more of a sense of timelessness. I’ll be sure to put together a follow up post later, showing you the final results of this rain-painting effort, but for now we must let time and the rainy heavens of winter have their way with it. And when the time is right, I will also create some sort of shot incorporating this completed background as a rich, patinaed canvas within which other, foreground elements may appear.
Just below: Perhaps here you can see how patina can add layers of information, color and texture. This is one of several images I’ve just been creating to help illustrate my upcoming lecture at the Northwest Flower & Garden Show, entitled: Left on the Cutting Room Floor: Gorgeous Photos That Didn’t Make The Book (The 50 Mile Bouquet). If you’re following, I bet you see more of it in the next few weeks.
Left On The Cutting Room Floor, building my Flower & Garden Show Lecture…
Here’s the perfect chance to show some of my favorite, never before seen pictures that didn’t make the final cut for the book and share several behind the scenes tales from the making of The 50 Mile Bouquet…
But how to weave all that into a story that will fascinate, entertain and flow over the imaginations of the audience like water? …or should that be like warm butter?
Start with tens of thousands of images shot in dozens and dozens of locations over a period of five years. Faces, places, relationships, actions, flowers, hands, bouquets, creatures, concepts. Now narrow that immense sea of images down to less than 200 that make sense for the book I co-created this past year with garden author Debra Prinzing, book designer James Forkner and the talented folks at St. Lynn’s Press. How exactly does one build a single slide that addresses all of that?
Here are the iPhone generated photos I shot yesterday as I worked out how to grapple with this ‘funnel it all into your brain’ concept.
First: I’m looking for something that I can use that looks like an immense funnel. Cue the violins as I dig this light fixture out of a dusty box in the basement and try to remember why I haven’t put it up outside my basement door yet. I hold it up while my trusty little iPhone camera counts down the seconds before shooting the self-timer triggered picture. Hooray for Camera+!
OK, it looks enough like a funnel that I think I can use it, but how can I get it to float properly above my head without having to hold it there? Thinking cap time. (PS, I’m wearing the hat in this case partly because I don’t want to have to go take a shower and wash my uber-frumpy hair before I can do this thing…)
Hmmmmm, a light stand, a triangular scrap of wood and a clamp. Yes, I’ll have to retouch out the stand and the back part of the light fixture, but on a dark, textureless background, that should be easy enough. Notice that I’ve now traded my regular eyeglasses for my three dollar “BugEye” glasses to add an overall touch of elegance and class to the image. And notice too that I’ve got the camera tilted at an angle so I can add type to the lighter side of the image while accommodating the crookedness of the ‘funnel’ since it’s hanging all cattywompus from the light stand/clamp. Tricksy little hobbit.
By jove, I think we’ve got it. And I didn’t even have to take a shower.
Oh noes… Can it really have been that easy? A mere half-hour from initial brainstorm to final shot. Still gotta download it into the computer and retouch it in Photoshop. And I need to come up with some kind of special effect for the myriad of photos that will be pouring down from the heavens into the funnel. Doh, and I still need to figure out what the slide should actually say, pick a font and then add the type. But hey…
Total build time for this one ‘concept’ slide: About 3.5 hours.
Only 79 or 80 more to go… Stay tuned.
Want to see how it all comes together? Come to the Northwest Flower and Garden Show on Friday, February 22. I’ll be presenting this seminar, Left on the Cutting Room Floor at 2:45 pm in the Hood Room and then signing copies of The 50 Mile Bouquet immediately following. Lectures at the NWFGS are free.
Today is another building slides day, in preparation for the Northwest Flower & Garden Show.
