Necessary Journey

When I left my position at CMHS at the end of June 2000, I was going to find a new career. I resumed the networking interviews I learned from Mike Kenney in 1985 to research what I would best be suited to do. Among my favorites: develop a nature travel/spiritual quest company to ferry Americans to the Philippines and take a six-month ESL accreditation course in Prague and travel the world teaching English as a Second Language.

My friend, Aldo, told me they could use another psychiatrist at a private clinic in Lafayette. Less than a month after leaving CMHS I was working as a psychiatrist again. I thought I'd do that just until I found what I really wanted to do. I stayed there for 7 1/2 years, half the time I was at CMHS, equal to the time I spent at my first position at the state hospital! Technically I am on sabbatical from the clinic and shall be returning sometime in March next year. I doubt I would though. The longer I do what I am doing now the more likely I would not go back.

My only "artistic" experience was drawing scenes from church rituals as a child in La Paz. I did that for a few months. In high school I discovered I could get respect by studying harder than anybody else and going to the top of the class. That ushered in the next forty years of my life. It was a good time. I learned a lot about myself and the world but there was always the feeling that somehow this was not what I really wanted to do.

I remember I had a cheap Kodak Instamatic camera when I came to America in 1975. Photography then was something one did when family or friends came to town. My first SLR with changeable lenses, a Minolta, revolutionized what I could do with photographs. For the next several years as my sister and I traveled and explored various sites on the continguous 48 states, I took photographs of buildings, building decorative details, close-ups of flowers, mountains and historical sites. I printed my photographs and mounted them on a dozen or more albums. On a trip to Niagara Falls I left the AF SLR camera at a restaurant.  With the older model of the Minolta which was harder to use, I lost my interest in photographs. Besides my closet was full of photograph albums that I didn't know what to do with.

A digital Sony camera changed my experience with photographs. The 2 MB images were amazing especially when I found out that by moving the camera very slightly I could take great pictures by manipulating the direction of the reflected light. I was hooked. I took the camera with its video-capability on my second trip back to the Philippines, this time with my older sister, Merma. I still have those tiny images but back then nobody else had a digital camera so what I was able to do stunned everyone else. Nowadays, of course, everybody and his brother carries some kind of digital image capture device and increasingly people take pictures with their cellphones. Back during the time of my Sony digital camera, this scenario was unthinkable!

I started using Apple computers in 1985. As the computer became focused on desktop publishing and then on digital media I was swept along in the digital revolution. I bought Final Cut Pro long before people even thought they could make decent videos at home. My old Canon took miserable videos (although the sound quality was pretty good even then). The next turning point for me was when I attended and earned Apple accreditation in video editing after attending a week-long seminar in NYC two years ago. I was more ambitious than I should be. The media were all touting the ease with which ordinary people could make "independent movies."

Last year I attended the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. That was another turning point for me. I didn't know that kind of excitement from attending psychiatric conferences all those many other years! I took seminars mostly in video editing and production but back in Indiana I dreamt more than I did any real work. My hard drives are full of projects I initiated but didn't pick up again after the first day or two.

I attended NAB again last April. This time, without intending to, I gravitated towards the hands-on seminars on shooting video, the use of studio lights, working with "talent," even make-up. That brought me closer to actually shooting videos. A month after coming back from Las Vegas I shot my first model, Kaleb. He was such a wonderful model that an hour into the shoot, while I lay uncomfortably on the floor so I could shoot up to his torso and face, I realized I was enjoying myself as I had not enjoyed myself ever!

Since then I have shot eight more models. Two, Arron and Scott, helped me learn how to shoot not only in the studio but outdoors in sunlight. The next turning point came when I accompanied Arron to his modeling school. The school owner commented how my photo images were not good enough. They did not look professional. Of course, they did not. They were too yellow! In an instant I grasped that I needed to work on white balance which at the time, a month ago, was a huge mystery to me.

I came back home that evening and used the white balance adjustment on Aperture with results that stunned me. I didn't know the software could do that. I didn't know my images could look as good as they do when the color balance was shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum. I had liked the tanned look on the models but they were too "tanned" and I didn't even know it until Karen pointed it out.

I don't know when I first bought Adobe products. I think I started with Photoshop and gradually through Adobe promotional sales I found myself owning the CS3 web design suite earlier this year. To tell the truth though I had not taken the time to learn the programs. Back then it was enough that I had them. Someday, I told myself, I would learn to use them. In fact this was what I told myself to justify going on a sabbatical late last December. I was going to be gone only until March but when I returned to clinical work very quickly I realized that was not what I wanted to do anymore.

Aperture has been great but in the last few days I have been discovering why photographers have been in raptures over Photoshop. With just a few mouse clicks, my collection of over 120,000 images look like they have never looked before. My studio shots particularly were revealed in their glory!

There is so much to learn. I tell myself that what I am doing is equivalent to going back to a four-year college. This is so entirely different from what I've done before. Over the years I've learned a smattering of computer language without really understanding the terms I was using. I knew of the software programs without really knowing how to use them. One day at a time I am learning that shortcuts are just not good enough. I have to get down to my knees in the mud and learn the programs from the ground up.

Meanwhile I have to continue putting out work that other people can access. Finding smugmug.com was another turning point for me. Here was a vehicle for putting my work up for sale in an elegant presentation without me having to reinvent the wheel. Despite my resistance I am learning mark-up language although I don't see myself becoming a master in XHTML. My passion is in generating portraits and images of people.

I don't know where this odyssey will lead me. In the last four months I feel I have learned so much that I could say I have made a career switch. I have moreover learned more in the past month than I learned in two years before May of this year. It's been a journey, and one that increasingly is becoming a necessary one for me to take. 

The problem of taking one step after another in one direction is that after a while we realize our path in life has changed. We could, of course, retrace our steps back to where we started but we could never go back home, Thomas Wolfe. We make the path by walking.