CATALYST

July 7, 2024

Been waiting for magic,
Killed time in traffic.
Inspiration is static —
Overstate for the dramatic

Fall back on a classic,
Easy, systematic —
Albeit anti-climatic.
Visual, photographic.

PORTA 800

July 2, 2024

On 181/365, I broke out the old Pentax with my nifty fifty and paired it with a Porta 800 film and here we are. I used this photo as a placeholder for the masses to let them know some 35mm film was on it’s way. So we’re doing a trade. Though these were not taken, they were developed today. I use to develop and print film myself but lack the facilities. Someday I’ll get around to converting a bathroom into a darkroom but until then, I’m at the mercy of Bart, the friendly photo lab manager at Sun Color Photo, the best film processing lab around.

181/365
I can’t remember where this camera came from. When I started in the darkroom in college, I received my own film camera... I think my mother, uncle, and maybe one or two others offered or gave me their old film cameras. I have several now. Each one has it’s own unique personality. I love the pentax the most, as it’s been so reliable, and a work horse. It's never failed — knock on wood — and only slips on the wind up in the last couple frames.

184/365 *yucca blossom*
My favorite of all that the ND prairie has to offer.

MIDDLE THINGS

July 1, 2024

I have an attachment to the North Dakota sky, land, weather, people…

180/365 *nothing happens the same way twice*

181/365

MAGIC ON THE PRAIRIE

June 17, 2024

There are very few things better than the wind in swnd and the big midwest skies, especially during storms.

Cotton trees are my favorite.
They’re the only tree that talks to you. They have leaves that whisper and cotton to carry your secrets.
When I was small, my grandmother told me “to grandmother’s house they go” in a sing-songy voice. All the cotton seemed to converge and gather in her yard… and I had all kinds of questions about the mysterious white specs that took over for a few weeks every year. She answered every single one.
I’d ride my bike and they would slip past my face and “to grandmother’s house we’d go…”
And so, we had a little visit on 167/365.

DISLOYAL ORDER

June 13, 2024

Doc, there’s a hole where something was
Doc, there’s a hole where something was
Fell out of bed, butterfly bandage, but don’t worry
You’ll never remember, your head is far too blurry

165/365 // *Doc, there’s a hole where something was*
inspired by *disloyal order of water buffaloes* by fall out boy

I will never give up my love affair with double exposure and crappy punk rock.
Never, never, never.
There is something so satisfying about forgetting a song for a few years only for it to come back up in rotation at the most perfect time so you can scream it at the top of your lungs.

I’m a loose bolt of a complete machine
What a match, I’m half doomed and you’re semi-sweet

So here’s a nod to one of my top five favorite FOB songs and my ongoing love affair with double exposures.

Nobody wants to hear you sing about tragedy
So boycott love (detox just to retox)

COLLAGE TAKE OVER

June 5, 2024

Collage exploration has begun.

It’s going well.

157/365 // *(Gone) have I been fading away? Shapeshifter, there’s no way back*
inspired by “gone” by knuckle puck

It’s the 5th of June. Every time it’s the 5th of June, I think of the song Gone by Knuckle Puck

But I'll still think of you on the fifth of June
'Cause when I saw you, I lost you all over again

This song is especially visual so it worked out well to continue the collage theme. But I have also been wanting to do this dispersion technique — where it looks like a person or object is “disappearing”. I teach it but don’t often use it in my own editing.

Doesn't it feel good to be invisible?
(Gone) just like the way I used to be
(Gone) have I been fading away?

So when I remembered “the 5th of June” I knew I could combine the dispersion technique with the visual words within the song.

You're a shapeshifter, you're never gonna get the girl
There's no way back, there's no way back
You're a shapeshifter, you're never gonna change the world
There's no way back, there's no way back

I like the word shapeshifter and as you may have noticed, I have a lot of photographs of birds. I took one of my favorites and allowed that to be the thing the figure is “dispersed” into, shape shifts into... It felt a bit incomplete until I added an “up is down, down is up” backdrop of this yellow house. This is why you save all the photos you take…

NOW & THEN

May 30, 2024

song: now & then by Sjowgren

I knew then what I know now
I may lose it for a second now and then

151/365 // *I knew then what I know now*

I rarely like a cross process image anymore. I overdid it when I was first starting out. It got a bit out of hand. I got burnt out but tonight the way the light hit the side of the white house. The clouds on the other side of the world were doing a thing. It felt like a cross process kind of light.

When I first learned how to edit photos, it was all self taught on an old site called pic monkey? picnic monkey? something really ridiculous and they had all these interesting presets. I would memorize how they changed my photographs. I got really good at analyzing color and light that way, so not time wasted but I would start to search for that “light”. Out in the world and how it would appear. I’d tell my friends, “Oh yeah, it’s totally cross process light right now.” I thought I was so cool, you know what, no I was cool, dammit.

Anyway cross process comes from film photography. It’s a technique that requires you to intentionally mess with the chemicals, like using the “wrong” or a different recipe for the type of film you’re developing. I only used one color film in college and I followed the recipe because, hello — rule follower. I regret not messing with color film more. Anyway using a different or wrong recipe made the film come out with random and unpredictable color changes.

When digital took over, people started manipulating photographs to “look” like film in photo editing software. I’m sure there’s a great video out there to tell you just how to do it wherever you edit but the best way to get good at editing is to just do it often and keep trying things. All I do for fake cross process look is shift the curves channels, mostly green and blue. In this double exposure image, I went a little past cross process but it still reminded me of back then.

So Sjowgren has the perfect song for that. It’s also a song that has just a strong feel to it and it felt like outside tonight. It is the end of something but it’s not over. The last day, but really just the start. Endings, beginnings, doors, windows. All the cliche sayings. I’m not sure what to think. My thoughts are still spinning, sitting, stalling, settling. I’ll have to get back to you.

But here’s what I learned tonight editing, I adore placing cloud overlays in prairie grass and blending with a soft light or hard light. Double exposures forever.

CLOUD GENERATOR

May 28, 2024

song: cloud generator by tycho

140.

May 19, 2024

down Alice’s staircase

the magazine room waits

beware of rabbit hole gates

IT'S ALL GONNA BE OKAY

May 10, 2024

When everyone gets the northern lights and all you get is a cheshire moon and darkness… Lemon life.
131/365

ONE DOWN

May 3, 2024

Are you paying attention?
The light this morning. It doesn’t get much better than that. Like a literal film light leak, splayed out across the eastern sky. I pulled over three different times and retraced my steps back and forth trying to find just the right angle to see it as it was.
I left the car running.
I left the window down.
I left the music on and it happened again.
One Down by Slaughter Beach, Dog played through the speakers.
Magic.

124/365 // 5/3/24 06:50:30
”One Down” by Slaughter Beach, Dog

The trees are bare
I breathe the air
I hold it down real deep
Before I let it out

The trees aren’t bare, they’re in bloom. The light leak looks like the sun taking a breath, holding it deep and letting it out. The smallest moments are the biggest ones in hindsight and I’ve got to collect them all. One Down.

BARELY, JUST BARELY

April 30, 2024

I barely, just barely out ran the rain tonight. On my drive home, I felt too tired to create a self portrait inside so I was hunting for a photo as the clouds swirled and drifted into thunder heads. There was a deep blue thickening up the west and I was chasing after it. I stopped about a mile from the house and pulled into a residential area. The plan was to run up — just the most massive hill —and get a wide shot of the road and said hill with the clouds rolling in but… It just wasn’t right. I saw the photo clearly in my head but it fell flat in reality. Maybe, for the best, because it did involve a lot of darting on and off the road on a blind approach.

On my way up the hill, before knowing all this, the sprinkles were just beginning. And I heard a plane so, naturally, I looked up. Shocker, I know. And there it was, almost floating in and out of this gray haze. I haven’t seen that before. The opacity faded in and out as it passed between these soft, foggy layers. I almost missed it, focusing and adjusting the settings but I got it, just in time before it was lost in the cloud cover.

On the way back down, it was a mad sprint to the car as the rain was roaring and the camera was exposed. Editing these, I get a bit envious of the simplicity of it all. The plane slips in and out of view, sheltered and isolated. I live near an airport and I watch them roll in from time to time. Some days, there’s one after the other, crystal clear. But occasionally, I can only hear them, obscured and guarded by cloud cover. Such a simple thing, wrapped in tiny liquid water droplets, high above it all. There’s a Tiny Moving Parts song called Day Drunk. And it goes like…

It’s just me in the kitchen looking up at the clouds
I wonder what they talk about

And it would make an interesting story if someone could figure out how to tell it.

BROKEN BOKEH

April 29, 2024

An understated photo for a stated day. I’ve taken versions and versions of this photograph for years. I remember the first time I saw bokeh. Bokeh: aesthetic quality of light rendered out of focus.

It was after a rain at Tschida. A big rain. I was still young enough to run around and do shenanigans in the rain. A dare to run here or there in the downpour. All the adults waited out the storm in the trailer and all the stupid kids sat on the deck daring each other to do this and that. Freezing toes, dripping hair, it was all for the glory and thrill of running around in a thunderstorm. After, the sun came out and I remember walking around behind the trailers with my camera photographing clouds. I saw the yuccas blooming and dripping and I got down to photograph them and there it was. These little dancing circles all over the viewfinder. I was enchanted, so many images of wet grasses and plants. These were some of the first images that made me feel like an artist because you can’t see this quite the same with just your eye. I thought I’d found something no one else had ever seen or knew.

But alas, it already existed and I was one of many who fell in love with bokeh the moment we met. It’s a nice boat to be in; good company here. I love a shallow depth of field. It’s my preferred aperture.

Until we meet again broken bokeh…

CALI CALLS

April 25, 2024

The morning light is unmatched. It’s underrated for photographers. Most prefer and stick to the golden hour, which is absolutely great practice but the blue hour and the first 90 minutes of sun up has its own beauty and poetry. As I said before, I am for sure a sunrise girl over a sunset girl. I came across this shadow and had to frame the shot. Might make a good series down the road —just light and shadow. To be continued…

Spotted this guy today. He had some sort of stick stuck to him… I couldn’t quite see the right angle or figure it out but in editing, it’s definitely stick like and stuck. It was warm today. Finally. The sky was also softer somehow — not quite as vibrant, a bit of UV haze scattered between us and the great blue. On the drive home it was absolutely “warm” in color and tone and luckily I was quick enough to capture this fella before the sky lost its softness. When the light looks like this or has the yellow UV spread it makes me think of California. And there’s no real founding for that, it’s just one of those things.

MY OH MY...

April 24, 2024

I love baseball. I can’t remember when it started because we didn’t have a team growing up but I listened to every story my dad told about his “good ol’ days” and I loved every minute of it. I was on the edge of my seat, bursting with questions. It was like getting to know a secret. He was a catcher and he would tell me all the things he would say to the batter to get in their head. He told the game as if it was live, happening right there. I hung on every word. The way he tells stories is unlike anyone else. Maybe it’s a dad thing, but I’m pretty sure that’s an LJF thing.

As the youngest in the family, I was left solo with my parents for four years of high school and it was honestly, really, really great. My dad and I would watch an hour or two of tv together, damn near every night. We watched some truly terrible television together. And some really great television too. It wasn’t really about what we watched, rather what we discussed in those moments. The back and forth, the turn of the phrase. A zinger for a zinger. A new catchphrase to add to our repertoire. A mumbled sentence that ended up sticking. I haven’t said the word probably correctly in a decade, because once upon a time, one of us said pobby. And now that is how you say it.

I remember when the world series came on and we started watching and betting. And again, I was on the edge of my seat, bursting with questions. There are moments frozen in my brain like this. Many of those frozen moments, we’re in our respective chairs, losing it over something that I can’t even remember anymore. Just fragments of funny phrases and words we said over and over again.

So when spring sports roll in and the kids go out to the diamond, I’m there. Especially, when one invites me as their honored guest. I think about my dad the whole time and I wonder what we’ll talk about during the next world series. Even though I’m not at home anymore, we still watch, in our respective houses.

And we still bet, every night via telephone. And I’m sitting on the edge of my seat, bursting with questions. My fingers cannot type fast enough to fire them off to him. But he always has the answer. And we always end up giggling. In the 2023 world series, it was “wiggle elbow” that got us. I still cannot think that phrase without laughing out loud and I want to use it when I’m out there watching… When I think I see one out on the mound. But there’s no one to tell. And that’s a little sad but it also lets me stay in my head and revisit the memories.

And that’s the ball game, folks.

PINK MOON & ORANGE HUES

April 23, 2024

Today had the strangest light. Crazy dark clouds, super blue skies, rainbows...Orange sunset and moons and apart from this first black and white drama shot, I apparently only wanted to show you orange hues.

114/365 // *17:58:24 where the horses watch*

114/365 // *20:05:00 where the birds watch*

114/365 // *20:12:11 where the lines cross*

114/365 // *20:16:03 where the smog gathers*

114/365 // *20:39:11 where the pink moon rises // edit: where the orange moon rises*

So the pink moon, as we now know, is just a name. What I didn’t know is that it would be ORANGE. Giant and orange. What a sight. What’s weird is my camera didn’t seem to capture the clarity as well as a “white” moon. Will have to further inspect all future moons and figure out what that was about.

LIFELINE

April 20, 2024

This mini series was born from a song called Lifeline by Angels & Airwaves. I have loved AVA for almost 20 years. The sound of AVA is so full of magic and space…like it sounds like actual stardust sometimes. I had this friend…I asked him once why I couldn’t get over Blink, +44, AVA, Boxcar Racer and all the others. And he didn’t miss a beat. We were so young, we were just beginning. Just becoming who we would be. The music we listened to shaped us, marked us, held us. It still holds me. It’s such a comfort. I don’t think I have the right words to describe it with the justice it deserves.

Any branch off from Blink ended up in my playlists... The lyricism of this particular branch is so visual to me that I think I could probably create a photo for every song… New challenge? One step at time, let’s just get through 365. But dibs on that idea.

So Lifeline, or a part of it, in visual form. It took a bit to get the right artificial wind, I ended with a hairdryer on a twisting chair. Vincent St. Vincent ran for his life. In post, I added a wavelength blur filter but erased to keep the portrait intact. In each, the eyes are hidden or obscured in some way. I always teach that when we hide the eyes in a portrait, it’s saying something. I’ll let you figure out what it means. Can’t give you all the answers, what fun would that be?

If you hear a distant sound
And some footsteps by your side
When the world comes crashing down
I will find you, if you hide.
And if you wish it, wish it now.
If you wish it, wish it loud.
If you want it, say it now.
If you want it, say it loud.
We all make mistakes
Here’s your lifeline

WISHING WELL

April 10, 2024

Time is slipping by.

98/365 // *i reached for a shooting star, it burned a hole through my hand*
inspired by the song “wishing well” by blink 182

Once upon a time, I stood with 50 other souls 5 feet from Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker, and Matt Skiba as they played Wishing Well. I spent quite a bit of money to be in this position. It was worth it. Feet fixed on the floor, totally still, eyes wide I never took my eyes off Mark. Just watching, entranced, I swear sometimes it’s like it wasn’t real. It still blows my mind that I saw and heard and felt what I did. There’s nothing like it. When a band is your favorite, there. is. nothing. like. it. Whenever I hear Wishing Well I’m transported back. I didn’t even have that on my top 10 or even 20 favorite Blink songs but now it will forever be. I remember starting to reach for my phone to record, but I stopped myself. I knew I would miss something if I looked away, even for a second, and I just couldn’t look away. I remember walking out after to wait for the main show that night and thinking how I would never be the same as I was before.

I was trying to describe a similar feeling today to my people... There are certain things in life that feel a certain kind of way and you only know if you know. Seeing a show like that. Being in that “space” is one of them. Like drinking ice water, feeling it slide all the way down, rest and settle in your gut. Like 30 minutes after a run, lungs tingle and ….sparkle? Ok, so I don’t have the words for that one yet, but I will. Like freezing, cold, bare skin turned to a warm campfire in the middle of the night. Some things you only know if you know. And as always, I know what I know…

99/365
This is the spot in the horror film where everyone yells at the screen. “Don’t go down that driveway!” And I don’t but I do run extra fast past it.

100 snuck up on me. It was upon me before I realized. I was walking and loved the uneven balance I saw in the sky. I’ve been looking up to the sky more than ever before. And whichever poor soul is next to me has to hear me dribble on about how interesting the clouds look today, and this and that. I stop talking and they say “yeah…” and I feel like a crazy person. I’m telling you, there are photos everywhere but you have to want to see them. So what I learned at 30 days in, is still true, 100 days in.

101/365 // *missed the boat*
inspired by the song “missed the boat” by modest mouse
Looking towards the future, we were begging for the past
Well, we knew we had the good things, but those never seemed to last
Oh, please just last

It is the 20th anniversary of Good News For People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse. A great album, but I had to jump ahead three years for this song for today... Another thing that’s hard to describe but it played in my head as I stepped outside to be greeted by the sky above. And boy, did I dribble on about the sky. “Someone painted the sky!” [face palm]. I once told my mom to play this song at my funeral and she listened to it and was not pleased. I giggle about that now. Whenever it comes on, I just feel the same: ready and at peace.

Here’s to the next 100 and maybe a few song inspired photographs.
xo CEAF out

WEATHER & OTHER VARIABLES

March 28, 2024

Spring break weather patterns and other atmospheric elements…

BIG DAY. BIG MOON.

March 20, 2024

A big day. Deserved a big moon. So yes, again, it’s thee moon, from this day.
80/365 a.k.a. 3/20/24 at 19:10.

Only resized for emphasis. Because today had a lot of emphasis.

I was going to write a big speech but now at the end of this day, I’m exhausted. So I’ll leave you with a quick list. Within the span of the moon setting and rising again, I felt it all: eager, excited, enamored and equanimous. Emotional and earnest, exasperated, but ending enchanted.