Michelle + Peter's Wedding

You guys, I've discovered the definition of "dream wedding couple." If there are any photographers reading this, you'll know - sometimes, you end up with tough clients that test your limits. Lately, I've been able to get some perspective and realize that these harder jobs just make me bulletproof in the face of ridiculous odds.

For the love of all that is holy, though, you NEED dream clients to keep spirits high. For me, that's been Michelle and Peter; relaxed, calm, excited, open-minded, completely in love, qualities I couldn't have checked off better if I had a pre-made list in my head. The best part? When you have great clients, your images end up better than ever.

For now, here's a taste of their wedding photos, including a few of my favorites from the day. Some quick details:

Getting Ready Shots: Hilton Executive Tower

Ceremony & Reception: Jacobsen Salt Company

Bridal Shots: Tillikum Crossing & the Classic Sash & Door Company

That's all for now, folks! Lots more to come, though! :)

-liz

ON1's Perfect Inspiration Series

Hey guys!

Just wanted to let you know what I've been up to lately! I'm working with my old company, ON1, to make education videos about photography and photo editing. They kindly featured me this month on their Perfect Inspiration series where I got to talk about one of my favorite topics: Equestrian Photography! How cool is that?!

Jump over to ON1 and check out my blog post about this type of photography and watch my video!

I'll be doing more work with ON1 as part of their Guru program, so keep an eye out for some of that educational content. :)

-liz

Pushing Forward

If you’ve spent any time reading my blog in the last two years, you’ll know that I’ve struggled with drive and creativity. These are two of the largest themes I deal with here and they’re two of the biggest issues that I fight on a daily basis. Not just in photography, but in every day life - drive encompasses more than just wanting to pick up my camera, it engulfs the ability to wake up in the morning, to get out of the house, to go to work every day. We have moments in our lives that push us to move forward and moments that cause us to halt. This is about those moments colliding.

About four years ago, I met John. I’d moved back to Portland, had been living in a house with three of my closest high school friends and was spending my time split between work and hanging out with my ill mother. My job at ON1 software was just kicking off, I was getting more work by each coming month and my bosses were allowing me to have more artistic freedom. While I was struggling with developing new personal projects, I was still picking up my cameras quite regularly. My 4x5 film camera had dozens of slides run through it, I was eating rolls of 120 for breakfast and my digital SD cards were constantly being rotated. 

John was a surprise, to say the least. When I met him, through a mutual friend, he irritated me to the core. He was awkward, yet overly cocky. He thought that talking about disgusting facts he learned in paramedic school was normal conversation. When he asked to take me out for drinks, I remember wrestling with the decision to cancel or to go get to know him better. Despite my hastily formed opinion of his personality, he charmed the pants off of me. On our walk home from the bar, John grabbed me in the middle of the street and kissed me. I knew my annoyance had turned into another feeling - warmth. 

As an EMT and CPR instructor, he was a polar opposite to me in almost every way. My room was full of photographs, handmade artwork and quilts. His apartment was full of textbooks, a TV/VCR from the early 90’s and paintings of ships. While my fondness for him grew over the coming months, he was also endlessly fascinating. He became a regular subject for me and was a perfect guinea pig for any photo project I wanted to work on. The awkwardness he showed in everyday interactions disappeared when I pulled out my camera, a rarity when photographing people. It was a constant surprise to see the calm, gentle demeanor I witnessed in our every day lives captured on film. He had a remarkable talent for pushing me to succeed, for believing that I was worth more than what I sometimes felt inside. While he struggled with his own demons, he never ceased to find ways to foster a sense of trust in myself and my work. 

Our relationship ended long before we officially called it quits. In the last year, while working through all of the emotional chaos surrounding break ups, my photography began to slip. Images of him started to vanish from my hard drives and were replaced with work. The confidence he still tried to foster began to wane and we both felt distance grow. John and I formally split over the summer.

The swells and breaks in my productivity fall in line with the moments of joy and sadness in our relationship. This seems like a pretty basic concept and I know that many people recognize similar symptoms. One of my closest friends is an unbelievable chef and has (unknowingly) been a perfect example of this notion. She cooks less when she feels depressed and tends to find more love in the kitchen when she’s in a better mood. Simple, right? 

Breaking up doesn’t automatically mean you’re throwing dishes at an ex or posting sad lyrics on Facebook. When John and I broke up, we held onto the warmth we had always felt for one another. Our lives may not have meshed well for a planned future, but the tenderness we shared lingered. Friendship can blossom out of a failed relationship if you’re willing to hang onto the pieces that are worth saving. As we tried to reestablish a baseline for what we are to each other, confusion grew. How can you miss someone, know it’s right to be apart, yet still attempt to find common ground? 

When I talk about moments colliding, I’m talking about this exhaustion of the ability to process what’s going on. Confusion in life tends to result in uncertainty in ourselves. The happy memories I have of John still exist and continue to make me smile, but now more strongly conflict with the painful ones. Since we’re no longer working towards a common goal, everything we felt for one another has fused into a ball of anxiety. How the hell do you generate a desire to create anything in all this mess?

2015 has been a year of searching for an unknowable entity and fighting for its very existence. Desire, drive, creativity, productivity, certainty, confidence, love - they’ve rolled into a cluster of ideas that I’m trying to find. Depression, self-hatred, frustration, confusion, dullness, weakness - all feelings I’m trying to rein in, fight against. Breaking up caused a large rift in my capacity to thrive, so these thoughts feel further away than they used to. While I recognize that time will help propel me forward, it can be hard to remember that some days. 

In the last few months I’ve started seeing someone new. As a writer, he’s revealed an old love I once had for poetry, so I’ve spent quite a lot of time lately sifting through anthologies. I came across a Max Ehrmann quote that seems to be just what I needed to read at just the right time:

"You are a child of the universe,

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should."

I don’t know where I’m going or what my future holds. I can’t seem to grasp everything that’s happened to me in the last year. My feeling are messy and crazy and don’t always make sense.

What I do know is that John made an adventurer out of me. I know that I didn't waste three years of my life with someone. I know that his belief in me still holds, as a good person and a good photographer. I know that even through tough times, he is a friend above all else.

And I’m certain that I have the capacity for something better, and that even though things aren’t completely in focus, life will unfold as it should.

-liz

Where Did All The Creativity Go?

Has anyone else noticed that finding the time to be purely creative is nearly impossible these days? 

I'm imagining that many of you are nodding your heads in agreement with me right now. I'm nodding my head as I type this, which is an odd sensation in itself.

My buddy Nathan is unabashedly one of the most artistically stimulating people I've met. Years after the college spark has faded and we've picked up jobs in cramped offices, Nathan consistently makes time to be creative. That word, to him and I alike, is exceptionally vague; it includes crafting elaborate Halloween costumes or writing poetry or even cooking a new, highly detailed recipe. He plans whole nights around creative consumption, gathering friends to talk and make 'things,' to keep their minds churning in a forward motion. 

It's unbelievably exciting to see people make time to step away from the drudgery of every day life and create something new. Out of all of my friends, many of whom proclaim they're 'artists,' Nathan is truly the only one that still makes such an amazing effort. Not for the sake of Instagram likes or others to fawn over his accomplishments, but entirely for himself. How rare is that these days?

These past 6 months have been tough. While the details of my desolation aren't important, the heart of the struggle is; how the hell do I work a 'creative' job (mainly as a wedding/portrait photographer) and still find time to make photography personal to me? 

My job isn't about my needs. It's about the clients I work for. Sure, I hold a copyright to what I shoot and have some control over how images are presented, but it's not my day that I'm capturing. It's all theirs. It's their blood, sweat and tears. It's their families and friends, their dress, their tux, their cake, their everything. I show up, take pictures and then leave. They've spent months planning one day of their lives. I've spent a couple hours planning some shot ideas, location scouting and I'm good to go. 

What all this boils down to is the utter lack of control I have over 75% of the images I'm taking right now. The other 25% aren't weddings, but many are still about client preferences over mine. So an insanely low percentage of photos I've taken in 2015 were entirely for me.

That sucks. There's probably a more eloquent way to state that fact, but give me a break - I'm tired pretty much all the time these days. Despite having wonderful clients who allow me to use my creative brain in fun ways, it's not their job to fulfill my artistic needs. My work and my personal life should stay separate, for a lot of good reasons - I don't want my vision colliding too heavily with the vision of my clients. (I preach this separation knowing full well that I'm dating a bartender I met at a wedding job this summer - whoops!). 

These past two months, I've been fiercely trying to find a way to marry (wedding pun!) my photography job and my desperation for a creative outlet. While I'm not done coming up with an answer, and I don't think their truly is one, I've stumbled upon something that's been helping me a lot; EDITING gives me the control I need when I lack that control during photoshoots.

Many photographers out there are probably chuckling at me, thinking to yourselves, "Oh please, I could've told you that!" You've obviously never had to work on 5 wedding shoots at once with no assistant, had to process 10,000+ images and had to correctly remember each couple's preferences. All while working a legitimate office job to make ends meet. Let's just say it's emotionally draining, time consuming and not a hugely creative job. It's fast processing until 2am, sleeping for 5 hours, going to work and then coming home to do more of it. The next time you see me and I look tired, remember that I don't sleep that much these days. 

So amidst the thousands of photos I'm processing for each wedding, I intentionally set aside 5 images. Five photos that I shot with a little more of me in them, that speak more towards my sensibilities than my clients. Not a lot, I know, but it's the right amount to keep me happy. When I get bored or frustrated during the long hours, I take one of those photos and I go editing-crazy. No batch processing or quick fixes in Lightroom, no prepackaged presets or fast actions in Photoshop - I take my freaking time. When I normally take 15 minutes on a wedding photo, I'll take 3 hours on one of these images. I treat them like they're 100% mine, I make all the choices I wish I could make and go full-on fierce with my editing styling. These photos still end up in the hands of my clients, but I feel a little more passion towards the end result. 

For the non-wedding photographers, this concept might feel a little strange. When talking about this practice with a fellow photographer the other day, they asked, "Don't you want to treat all your wedding photos like that? Shouldn't you be passionate about all the images you're shooting?" The answer is an unequivocal "HELL NO." I just finished processing one of my recent weddings today and there are 400+ photos. Do the math in your head real quick; 400 images, 15 minutes on average for each photo, which comes out to 6000 minutes, ending up around 100 hours of work. ONE HUNDRED HOURS of editing. And when I say that's average, I mean it - a lot of photos take a lot longer than 15 minutes, so tack on another few hours for the more difficult images. I literally don't have time to be passionate and creative towards each photo. So I choose 5 (this usually ends up to be a larger number, but I always start out with 5). To me, that's a pretty good compromise.

For now, this practice is keeping me sane. I get to throw a little more me into my wedding photography, I get to hone my Photoshop skills and I get to send my clients some great final products that will hopefully end up on the phone screens of their friends and family. 

There's a lot more work I need to do to keep my brain on track, creatively. I'm currently dating another freelancer and we've been talking a lot about this problem; how do you balance the need to make money with the want to create? By writing notes down for the book you're working on while you're on a lunch break. By snapping a photo of just the gorgeous scenery during a wedding shoot. By sketching doodles on the bottom of your legal pads. By skipping one freelance gig to photograph for a project you swore you'd still be working on. 

Solutions are easy to come up with, it's doing them that seems to be hard. 

Lots of love to all you creatives out there and good luck,

-liz

Two Years

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I want to remember my mom. 

Today marks exactly two years since she passed away in our home. As my father put it, there are details from that day that still feel extremely vivid and I don’t think will ever fade away. The day she died was sad and beautiful and intense and I wake up to that moment in my mind every morning. As I roll out of bed, I imagine her face, her smile, her odd calm and then I go brush my teeth. From a fleeting second to the long 20 minutes as I prep my french press, I reflect on the knowledge of her passing at the start of every day. 

She’d be unbelievably irritated by this. Despite two years since losing her, I can still hear her voice in my head. Talking to me, yelling at me, soothing me, laughing with me. She reminds me that she never wanted to be immortalized, that she hated the idea of us enshrining her. Yet there’s not much we can do about that fact, that day was important to me. Her life was important to me. The memories I have of her may slowly grow dim in the back of my mind, but they will always exist. She will always exist to me.

The largest remembrance I’ve held of her lately resolves around a piece of paper I keep on my bulletin board. Many years ago, before the cancer had eaten away too much, before the surgeries had reached double digits, she was still struggling with the idea of Cancer. With the big ‘C.’ She had plans and ideas for her future, yet a restless confusion about the effects of her disease on them. For both cathartic and artistic reasons, she wrote a call to action for herself, short bursts that seemed to remind her why she woke up and moved forward with those future plans.

“Cancer will not define me. If I kick it now, it’s been a good life. Pay the bills tonight. I have no regrets. Remember to return those library books. No more, I’ve had enough. Liza is having her first photography show. I’m going no matter what. At least I’m not dead.”

They’re the kind of one-liners we remember from a long period of deep thinking. As you contemplate what you’re supposed to do one afternoon, from paying those bills to talking to your sister about her husband, you pull a few pronouncements from the bunch, scribble them down on a piece of paper to help remember where your brain had wandered. These are just quick statements. They’re honest, mental notes not just about depositing a check and running to the library, but real assessments about life at the moment. 

I keep these close to me, always. Just like I think they did for my mom, these words remind me that I have things to do. A life to live. People who need me. Plans for my future. Sure, I’m not dying, but it is so damn easy to forget these simple ideas in the mess of everyday living. My concept for the bigger picture gets eaten away as I drive through traffic to work. As I sludge through bills at home. As I mindlessly type emails. The crucial introspection, the prospects ahead of me, the daily moments of joy get lost in the shuffle.

This paper was pinned by her sewing machine, down in her basement fabric lair. She had it close to her every day up until she passed. I hope it served as a small prompt to wake up and look around her, to remember she was still alive, that she had a family who was always there and despite the obstacles, she had a life she needed to be living.

This sheet of paper is now pinned by my bed, close to me everyday, and reminds me to never get lost.