Posts tagged erica
My portfolio is way out of date so I’ve been digging through my (incredibly, ridiculously messy) harddrive trying to cull and organize my images. I found this little gem. Her Mom was a little upset she refused to take off her princess outfit and wear a matching white shirt like the rest of the family. I tried to reassure her, telling her that her daughters stubborn streak made for adorable photos and lovely memories. I’m not sure my reassurance worked at the time, but I hope she looks back on these with a warm heart. I hope all my clients can look back on their photos that I’ve created for them and remember good times, funny personalities and how they use to be :)
Last week I made a routine trip to Michigan to pick up Xander and bring him here to L.A. Our time for this visit was less than 10 days. I can’t begin to express what has been happening the last couple of years, struggle after struggle, brick wall after brick wall, and now we’re at this point in our lives. I think Xander, Mike and myself have dealt with a lot of nonsense together and while, unfortunately, we’re still dealing with it I’m proud of us. I’m proud of Xander B. for being such a smart, kind, funny and sweet little man. I’m proud of Mike for all he’s done amidst the craziness that has been our lives lately, and I guess I’m proud of myself for not going completely insane. ha.
I know that my concentration on my photography lapsed a great deal. I think my anxiety about not being creative sent me into a self-induced, spiraling depression. I’ve spent many, many hours beating myself up about it and wasted a lot of time. Now I’m past the point of caring if anyone else sees that as lazy or unfocused and I’m past the point of caring to listen to the part of me that wants to tell me I’m not good enough. I am on the exit ramp of a hellatious 4 years of my life. On multiple occasions Mike encouraged me to talk about it, write about it or try and share and connect with people in some way. I think he thought that would help me get through things. Of course I like to do things the hard way so I ignored that advice. In reality I think I was just shaken to the core from losing my Mother, finishing school, legal fights for Xander, losing my Grandmother, losing my 9-5 job, and then the move to L.A. and some more legal battles over Xander.
I’ll be honest, I expected this blog post to be laconic as usual with some images attached. It was beautiful, as always, to spend some time with Xander. He’s growing up so fast and every time I take a photo of him he looks more and more grown up. This realization sparked a panic in me and I might have been a little overbearing with the camera this time, as you can see by his disapproving face in a lot of these images, but he lived and is virtually unharmed.
I picked some of my favorites to share, hope you all like them. The light in my kitchen and bedroom is fabulous as well as in the back of our building. It’s all natural and filtered and warm. The alley behind our place is where I shot my recent self portraits. Now if I can just pull Mike away from his computer long enough to shoot him too.
