Transparencies

Sometimes my insecurities can take over, and I feel like I am a fraud.  I am not really who I think I am.  I am not good enough at this or that.  Thoughts that I am not a good enough mother, or a good enough photographer plague me.  And at the same moment that I feel these emotions and feel these thoughts trying to control me,  I logically can see the transparency of it all.  Good enough,  what does that even mean.  Everything, and I mean everything in life is relative.   What is good enough for someone is not for another.  Why do I care if I am good enough.  If I am doing my best at something (albeit, occasionally failing) that is enough.  That should be enough for me.  Do I love taking fotos?  Yes.  Does it make me happy?  Yes.  Do I enjoying pushing myself to take better and better fotos?  Yes.  So it is.  That is enough.  I am enough.  You are enough.  Just the way we are.  Sure we can always strive to be better, that is a good thing, but we can also appreciate how far we have come and wherever we are on our journey.  Sit in the moment and take it in, and try (at least I try) to be grateful.
 This image of a slightly translucent and rather minuscule flower was a bit of challenge for me.  I like to shoot with a shallow depth of field (DOF), but I am discovering that I really have to close down my aperture (bigger f numbers) in order to get enough of the these tiny things in focus.  This of course shuts out more light.  This process makes me think how grateful I am that I finally worked up the nerves some years back to get out of P mode and go over to manual. The process I now go through to zone in on the correct settings is almost like a form of meditation,  and though the results are not always the best,  the process, the journey, is a success in itself.

Experimentation in small measures

I am a portrait photographer.  I have tried to take nice landscapes, and I just do not seem to have what it takes.  Of course I do get the occasional decent looking shot of a beautiful lake or some exotic location, we all can get lucky sometimes.  But in general, I feel like my landscape photography is rather lacking.  Being as I actually started off as an underwater photographer,  I thought that nature/landscape photography would come quite naturally for me.  It didn't.  It doesn't.  Aboveland shooting is literally a whole other kettle of fish!  (pun intended).  I found this difficult to deal with, though honestly I supposed if I dedicated myself to the craft and studied and tried, perhaps I could become a better landscape photographer, but that is just not where my passion lies.  But I love nature.  I love gardening, I love plants, animals,  heck I even love dirt and feeling it between my toes!  So how do I incorporate this into my passion for photography and lack of not being able to dive like I used to.  Macro!  That is right,  the closest thing to underwater photographer I have found is macro.  I love it,  it is addicting, though it can be rather time consuming, and since I usually have three crazy munchkins and often two furry ones on all my nature outings, it can be rather difficult to capture the images I dream of making.  But this is a journey,  it is part of life.  so I take the shot when I can, and just enjoy it with my naked eye when I cannot.  But this summer I did invest in a new macro lens, which I am really enjoying.  I hope to be able to spend more time developing the skills I need to make amazing macro images.  The camera settings are not the same as when I shoot portraits, and I am enjoying challenging myself.  I leave you with one of my first images I took with my new lens. I am sure there will be many more to come.  BTW I am slightly obsessed with ladybugs!

End of the summer

So I have not quite come to terms with the fact that it is the end of the summer.  School is in session and Autumn is on her way.  This summer was so strange,  in that I feel like it almost did not happened.  I do try to be mindful and live in the moment, but I swear I blinked the the summer was over.  Where did it go?  I am not sure.  Even as I look back through the pictures I took this summer, it seems like there are not so many of them.  Where did they go?  I do not know.  Do you?  So I browse the ones I have and remember the fleeting memories.  So grateful to have these images to remember by.  I do not know about you, but since having children,  I feel like my mind is going.  My memory not as clear.  I remember feelings better than events or happenings.  Perhaps this is why I became a portrait photographer,  to try and preserve the memories my brain just seems to have a hard time holding onto.  Memories pop in and out, and they are beautiful and luscious,  or sometimes bitter and sweet.  But I will hold onto my images in hopes that my memory does not leave me entirely.  Picking strawberries this summer, yes, that is a memory I would like to hold onto.  Looking at the picture I can almost taste them....yum.

Free at last!

I have to admit that this blog is woefully neglected.  Nearly a year since my last post.  I suppose it is because I find myself overwhelmed by all the social media outlets.  Feeling the need to post to instagram, to facebook, to the blog, it can all be too much, for me anyway.  Trying to decide which images would be the most appealing, which would get the best response. Not to mention, I was never really sure if I should post in Swedish or English.   I suppose the pressure of posting the best possible images led to posting less and less, and finally not at all.  I find myself with hundreds of images that I love but no one (except the ones intended for customers) ever see.  Sooo, while laying in bed last night I came to the decision, that I will reclaim this blog.  I will post with no pressure on myself. I will post merely because I feel like it.  There need not be rhyme or reason, only the desire to share, albeit there may be no one out there in my cyberspace.  It feels so liberating somehow. No idea where these pressures arise from, perhaps my own head,  must be actually.  So I guess this will now become a place where I learn to free myself, a work in progress with no plan, no pressure, just a relaxing meandering down my own photographic journey.  So I leave you with my thoughts and a picture of one my muses.