Move It, Shake It

Sorry, I am better now. I do hate being at home all the time and am greatly going to miss my studio up in SB. It serves as my place to go and be a photographer. It is my space. And now I can't afford in anymore and feel irresponsible if I leave the house because I am spending money on gas, money on food, money on existing outside these four walls. But that is just it. Inside these four walls I don't always exist. Outside them, I do. I just need an actual paycheck to make that feel more like I earned it and less like I am leeching. I don't want to leech. I don't want to be a kept woman or a home body. We have no kids, so it is not justified for me to be home all day. I realize that I can use this time to be creative, can use this time to focus on making my work for my final show, but it is hard to do that. It is hard to decide to be productive in the same way that other creative people are productive.

When I was writing my second novel I would come home from work and sit down at my computer for sometimes three or four hours a night. In some ways writing takes you away to a new place, allows your imagination to create whatever you want. It can be a very liberating, very exciting journey. Photography has a very different feel for me. I can create images, sure, I can set up the landscape of my choice, the props, the costuming, but that preproduction doesn't flow as quickly and easily as you can write a story. (I am not saying that there is not preproduction to good writing, mind you, there is a ton of it, but when I write, I write what comes to me and worry about the editing later.) With photography, one of the things that I always mention when I am teaching or lecturing is that you should have a ton of preproduction. You should make the image exactly the way you want it to turn out and do a tiny bit of post to make those elements perfect that didn't come together naturally during the shoot. There is less room for imagination in a lot of ways. Less room to play when the actual creative act is at hand.

At any rate, at this point in time I am using these four walls as my studio, shooting a project that doesn't stimulate my creativity nearly at all. My intellectual side, maybe, but not my creative. Which is why I have to get out of the house. Go anywhere, do anything. That is the beauty of a laptop, the freedom of a G10. I don't need the set up, don't need the studio just to live, just to find that place where I exist beyond this insanity and find some peace in the moment. And the air always feels good through an open car window in spring, driving down the highway.