January 17, 2024
Today was an odd day. The kind of day when you just want to go back to bed for a while and try again later. I started the day off by almost missing my therapy appointment because I lost track of time working. I was also messaging a couple of friends who are all going through a rough time. Some of my friends have recently lost people who shouldn't have been taken so young. Some of my friends are going through the growth pains of life. Some of my friends are living their best lives without a care in the world, too. It just seems like an awful lot of my social circle got hit with a lot of tragedies and crises all at once.
So it was a heck of a start to the day.
By the afternoon, I was wrapping up working on the website here and I was trying to decide what I should make a subject out of for today. I was struggling to see anything calling out to me. My apartment is a bit of a mess right now because of how busy I have been and how little energy I have had left over for deep cleaning and organizing, which I am very behind on. So, I was feeling embarrassed about snapping a picture of anything. While I was sitting in my chair, looking around my living room for a subject, Katie fell asleep in the chair next to me.
And there it was, my subject.
I love getting pictures of Katie, and weirdly most of the time when I really want to get a photo of her, she's asleep.
Katie sometimes sleeps in the strangest poses, and I find this fascinating. So, as she leaned her head over onto her shoulder as a pillow, like she was holding a phone to her ear without any hands, I decided, "Perfect."
Behind Katie, laying in her cat tree and also taking a nap, was Nora. I couldn't resist the opportunity. I love both of them so much.
I still wanted to find something else to work on for the day, though and nothing was jumping out at me. So, I stopped and asked myself if I could place some guard rails on what I was looking for. I decided that since I was struggling to find a subject, maybe I should try something without a subject. That sparked much more imagination for me today. I tried taking some macros of the textures on my walls, floors, and doors. Some came out okay, but everything was still looking too flat. Then, I found myself staring at my pride flags hanging on my walls while thinking about the problem.
The problem was color. It's hard to get a texture pattern with 2 colors, but it is much easier if you have better contrast. So, I decided that I would try blurring out my pride flag as much as possible to try and create a kind of rainbow texture thing. It came out really well, and I will probably use these textures as assets now for some of my other projects.
Even though I was struggling to find a subject today, I still went looking for something to shoot. By doing so, I found something that wasn't just good practice for today but will be a useful finished asset for tomorrow. A nice outcome, but the real lesson was in how to actively look for something. If no photo is jumping out at me, how do I walk away and still have a productive session? Change the perspective, maybe. Or take the perspective away entirely sometimes.
Perhaps my friends and I can start to approach our problems in other areas of our lives differently, too. Maybe some of these growing pains are inevitable growth, pushing us into these new or profound perspectives. Maybe the image is so blurry right now, that it's hard to see what the bigger picture even was or should be. And maybe, that profound and blurry perspective will be a useful one for us to have later.
But for my friends who are grieving, it will always be an unwanted perspective. One they can't change, only learn to live with.
When you go out into the world to live your life today, see if there is something out there you didn't think about before. Try to put yourself in a different perspective. Blur your expectations. You may be surprised what you find.
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