at my Love Soaked workshop, we did a rotating shoot to give everyone a chance to apply what we’d been talking about and this meant everyone–including me–had TEN MINUTES to direct our model families. woof.
so what do you do in ten minutes? what do you want to say with your photographs if you don’t have the luxury of time? take that stale process of yours and shake it up, baby. blend it in the blender and see what you create on the other side. one of my favorite books ever is Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg. She shares tons of prompts and exercises and one of my favorites is to list verbs related to an activity on one side, and nouns related to a different activity on the other side. then you slice ’em all up and get yummy pairings like ‘sizzle ski’ and ‘fry snow’ from a verb side cooking and noun side skiing. it forces you to think in a new way, even if you mostly get nonsense, you get something NEW. we need to do the same with photography. at the beginning we need formulas and frameworks and rules, and then, we need to mush and smash them all into something uniquely our own.
Beautiful. i loved your stories today about how to communicate sensitively and authentically to parents of babies with special needs – it resonated with me because even though i went to school for, and for years worked with, families who had babies with special needs, i still have never experienced what it is like to have a baby of my own with special needs, and feel all the feelings every day, in every outing, every time i have to stay in for therapy, etc, my good intentions and natural tendencies to ask over-personal questions doesn’t fly with everyone, especially on the days that are just plain doozies. it all made so much sense to me and i’m thankful you said exactly how to approach different situations. so much love to you… and sorry for all these run on sentences… 😉