Peace

Powerlines are usually the bane of my photographic existence. This morning I made what peace I could with them.

Vanilla Rain Jewelry

I have the pleasure of working with an awesome up and coming local to Bend hand-made jewelry company. See their products here at their internet store. I'm excited to continue working with them on more model shots and studio product photography! These are great quality earrings hand made here in Bend, and make great and fashionable gifts!

Stiletto Salon Shoot

I had the opportunity to work with two amazing sylists and makeup artists at Stiletto Salon. One of which is Shawna Rahn- please check out her Blog. I'm excited for the new opportunities that this kind of photography provides for me and am very interested in doing more work on hair and makeup, especially with Stiletto Salon. Check out my favorite photos from that shoot on my Flickr.

Congratulations to Jeff and Jenna on their recent engagement! Their recent photo shoot was fantastic fun (as you can see from the shot above). I'm getting more and more excited about doing engagement photos with newly engaged couples. This photo shoot took place both in Drake and Shevlin Parks during magic hour just before sunset. Check out the full gallery by clicking the photo link to the right.

I took a surfing trip to the coast this last week to see my folks with my great friend Charlie and the beautiful Amy. Trying to get some of the best things in all at once in life, we stopped to smell the conifers several times with views of elk, scenes of epic waterfalls, sand dunes, activities like seagull feeding, donut shack conversating, meeting book store owners that "Never Miss" and eventually getting some surfing in with a little mardi gras beers and big game hunter arcade games with colorful locals to match. We came upon this amazing sight/site where there had obviously been an event in the life of our natural surroundings. The photo above is our rememberence of this place. It is of myself, standing on the edge of a slash pile, where the unusable timber was slashed and burned incompletely in the damp coastal air. The coast range of Oregon has continually been laid to waste by logging operations that clear cut hillsides of trees and vegetation that keep topsoil from washing away into the watershed, thus silting the stream with particulate matter that kills fish, macro-invertebrates, and eventually us. This has become our legacy. Standing upon a slash pile, I wonder what mistakes we will be trying to make right twenty years from now.

Habituation

Sometimes good habits are hard to start (like writing a blog as often as you would like). Sometimes our lives seem a collection of habits. Somewhere in the tug of war between responsibilities and personal comfort we fashion for ourselves these ritualistic automated acts of life. This has become my merciless enemy in creating this blog, at every turn my life has a seemingly random but really cleverly disguised repetitious habit centered rhythm that stymies any spontaneity or creative explosions. Deep introspection and the will to create become lost at my usual bedtime of right around midnight (which I am indeed staying up past in order to release my creative urge tonight) and this is one of the least poetic and romantically artistic rituals of all- the bedtime. I can envision Hemmingway awake from dusk til dawn drinking red wine and writing and boxing and tasting the grit of reality deep into the night. London sailing out from San Francisco into a starry Pacific night, dreaming of the cold Yukon. Ansel Adams writing letters in the evenings of lofty environmentalist ideal between the chemical baths that developed his craft. I use these examples of people that I romanticize to have led incredible and meaningful lives. They did not live for self-glorification for the most part, but for a dead-set collection of eccentricities that could be seen as the fearless pursuit of life and every richness witheld, or on the other hand as the terrified flight from what most folks trapped in ritual would deem necessarry responsibility.
The question comes to me now, am I truly an artist such as these? If so am I brave enough, or perhaps frightened enough to truly live? Does courage lie in responsibility or is courage itself an illusional merit given to these ordinarily responsible and extraordinarily talented people posthumously?
I am blessed to have an amazing and adventurous woman in my life that took an amazing adventure with me to a place I had wanted to see since I was a child and learned of its existance from cartoons and western stories- The Painted Hills. Of course I took a sickening amount of pictures that you can view on my flickr account by clicking the slideshow above and to the right of this text. This adventure was necessarry and was completely outside of my usual "life". Why is it that these punctuations to life can truly become life itself if allowed to be? OR do most people go throught life with only punctuation, namely a series of dots or dashes or numbers (in a bank account perhaps) that continue in a steady stream of wake-up/coffee/work/food/sleep predictability. Discipline is important, but not when its motivation is complacency.
Breaking out of habit can mean the difference of a life lived or a life sacrificed to unchanged and uncaring religiosity of ritual. In other words, go. Go and do something. Think something brave. Start anywhere.

Materials

Sometimes I feel like I need to be qualified by substance. What I mean by this is that if I have free time and want to be in a public setting, that I need to pay an entrance fee at a coffee or tea shop. I need to have pre-requisite cup with a little cardboard ring around it in order to feel like I have a purpose for being downtown. This idea must come from the capitalist system that we've developed where a person cannot exist in a public space without a good reason or we deem it loitering. this good reason has also been boiled down and lost in the cycle when a good reason can consist of a cup of liquid with a paragraph of pseudo-latin-based words to describe the cup size and fat content of the milk. The public library would be a great place to hang out and not feel the need to drink coffee (especially because they don't allow food or beverages inside) but you can't loiter and talk to someone in there because it's a library and needs to be silent for study. Perhaps if we built a public loiterary, somewhere where people can gather to do work, meet with friends, be creative, where they are not qualified or given an unspoken entry fee of something material.