The Pool

After going with Arron to John Robert Powers last Sunday, I felt a chapter closed for me.

Going was exciting. This was Arron's first interview with a professional model organization and it was mine, too. I could have gotten additional clients for my model photography but I didn't, which was the right decision. But I looked at the photos the other candidates were carrying. Arron's photos that I shot were better. He printed them from the download sites I had created for him and the prints were okay. These two items validated my efforts so far.

I finished shutting down my office in Broad Ripple yesterday. While at the office, one of the company staff approached wanting me to shoot her four-year-old son. I told her I'd do it. Slowly I am shooting a variety of models and putting together my portfolio. At this point, shooting models allows me to experiment with lighting as well as processing options. I don't believe that I'm ready to start marketing myself.

This morning I woke up feeling my energy refreshed. It felt as if the cloud in my mind had cleared. I had checked out stock photography while reading and reflecting upon the books and website of Rohn Engh. Stock photography was not for me. For the last three months I have been doing model photography. I'll continue shooting people. I enjoy working with models and capturing the emotions in their faces but this too is not the right fit for me either. I am still an actor in search of his play.

I went back to the pool this morning and shot some more photos that I want to put together with the shots I took of Arron and Scott for my first photo essay. Photo essays or editorial work is what appeals to me right now. But the original draw for getting into the imaging industry still smolders under all that I have learned photographing models, setting up a workflow for capturing and distributing images, and building my first professional website. I wanted some elemental thing that also engaged and excited me when I worked with clients in a clinical setting. I want work that would touch me as movies, visual art and literature has touched me. I look at the gorgeous images people create with their camera and I am awed but I am left with a feeling that something was missing in this for me.

Before getting out of bed this morning I read an article in the latest issue of Moviemaker magazine (Issue 76) about the 40th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Critics especially the heavyweights on the East Coast railed against the movie but the audience, especially the teenagers and those living on the West Coast adopted it as their own. The movie somehow found its place in the longings of an era of Americans and emblematized what they wanted from life and their vision of the future.

Maybe some part of me still harbors great expectations for me. Maybe quitting my daytime job for this ephemeral pursuit I am returning to the heyday of my youth when ambitions clustered and seemed possible. I feel I have not tapped my true potential and that even with the short time left to me there is still time to fulfill the promise of those early years. What exactly the promise is remains unclear.

While surfing my favorite sites this morning I came across smugmug.com, a website home for photographers with special sensitiveness to Mac users and Mac sensitivities. Joining this community might be the best way for me to join the Internet community. The company espouses values similar to those I hold. I don't have to spend the next three or four months mastering Flash but use their site instead to create a commercial website. I still want to learn CSS, HTML and Action Script. I like digital technology but I don't have to create my universe from scratch and all alone. I can ride on other people's coattails while I search for what it is that makes me tick. In life's pool of possibilities, where am I?