2020 was a weird year, yes? It feels like the year from which I've shared the least, and that silence feels like both a stuck-ness from fear of saying the wrong things at the wrong time and also a silence that was necessary to make sense of everything that was happening, to be able to step back to truly listen with empathy and compassion. Sharing is a practice I'm trying to cultivate for[...]
A week ago - real-time, not corona time-warp time - I had to cancel the shoot that would have turned into the next collection in the Cheerful Print Shop. (A little bit of backstory: At the end of last year, I shared plans in my newsletter and on instagram to launch four new collections into the shop in 2020. The first one, The Deep End, was launched in January.) This second collection was one I'[...]
A visualization - for the times when you need to do something that scares you: Imagine you’re standing on a ledge above a big, blue expanse of water, looking down. The pool below you is fathomless, crystal clear, and you you can’t even tell how far down it goes. The sunlight sparkles off the surface, inviting you to join it in sinking below, as it streams through the tiny waves lappin[...]
These days, I’m making from a place of play, of experimentation, where curiosity is my north star. I mean, I suppose I’ve always tried to do that for every wedding or portrait session, but now it feels like it’s on a bigger level. This looks like pitching shoots that don’t fit neatly into a box - are they brand shoots, or portrait shoots, or narrative shoots, or fine art[...]
I spent a year photographing yoga, and it cracked me open. It literally taught me how to open my heart, and what that even means. The parameters of the project were this: the photos could not be about perfect postures, but about the process, the imperfect, the personal and the real. It was about the practice, not the performance. It helped that the yoga studio was a five minute walk fro[...]
Oh hi, we’re at the end of 2018 and I feel like it’s been a long time since I’ve shared a personal update. I don’t know if I can overstate how much of a year of change and growth this has been, and yet in the midst of so much that looks different from a year ago, the one constant thing that has woven so many of the days and experiences together is connection - to myself but also[...]
I want to hold on to, to hoard, beautiful things like flowers. I want to pick a figurative bouquet of all the things I love and surround myself with them to keep them close to my heart. But this type of hoarding goes against my deepest value, that beautiful things are made to be shared because by sharing them, we send even more wonder and love and positive energy into the world. As I wr[...]
Imagery is my native language, not just out in the world, but also inside my head. My thoughts come through in colors and pictures more than they do in words and sometimes the words just can't keep up or they come out all wrong if I'm trying to get something out of my mind and through my mouth and that's why I talk fast and start stories in the middle. And write run-on sentences.[...]
I took my first surfing lesson in Sayulita in January. But before we get to that, I need to zoom out just a bit, because this story starts in November of last year, when I found out that Ben was going to be spending the winter - all of January, February, and March - in Palo Alto. We have done long distance before, and that wasn’t why I knew I couldn’t stay behind. I was afraid of the[...]
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text] Just before we move to Austin, I thought it might be time to share my most favorite room in our Annapolis house - my cheerful home office. Somehow, when we moved here, I swindled Ben into giving me this entire back room of our house to use as my office, and then also managed to convince him that we needed to add a window to the room so that I could hav[...]