ReCreating Myself

You are never the same person all of your life, you have incarnations of a different you, daughter, wife, mother, carer perhaps, artist and many more which is how it should be or we would go mad with boredom. How we get there is up to us and certain outside interference which we usually don’t see coming. For me it was a VAA strategy session that turned into a light bulb moment and it’s scary because i know that going forward and moving to portraiture is going to show a lot more of me than landscape photography ever has. I’m on another journey of discovery and i have to jump while i can, jump into letting my mind allow me to immerse myself in the human form, to letting go of the things i have held onto for such a long time, letting others take the strain and doing things just for me.

Small steps are required, im a control freak who hates others doing what i can do myself but im going to try. The first thing has been getting my kids who are young adults now and my husband, who is quite capable, to cook our evening meal. Its just one small step, the next step is to talk to the women i know who model and ask them for their time and experience so i can learn how to photograph people, who better to ask! I can see there is so much to accomplish before i can say i am a portrait photographer, im chipping away at it slowly, i have the time. Im going to need a name for a start and thats a lot to think about, having the wrong name / brand wont help, a few suggestions would help and im going to need equipment, all of my kit is aimed at landscapes and many of my lenses just wont work for portraiture.

I can apply for grants to help with equipment and costs, the goodwill of my friends and family so i can practice on them but it is my mindset that needs a lot of work, as i go forward i will need to allow myself to become something different and that will be a journey and a half. For so long my mind has been moulded into carer mode, i’ve not allowed myself to have a selfish bone in my body and now i need a lot of them. It’s going to be the quiet times in my mind, the thinking times, the introspective times that will allow me to recreate myself and i know it will be a struggle and take time and courage a lot of courage as im rather shy you know.

Maybe i will start a new blog all about this phase of my life and chronicle how the caterpillar became a beautiful butterfly.

How Covid 19 is changing my life….. part 2

I began taking photographs for myself in 1995, the year my eldest child was born. We bought a Canon Sureshot to start documenting the life of our baby, lots of people do it. As he grew and more children were added to our family the photos continued. I graduated to a Minolta bridge camera and discovered i actually enjoyed going out exploring with my husband and taking photos of landscapes. After a while i borrowed a Canon D60 and that was my KERPOW moment, i finally knew what i wanted to be when i grew up, a landscape photographer!

I was encouraged by my friends and family and started to print photos, looking back they were so bad! Fast forward a bit, i’ve become a better photographer but now i’m a carer for my mum who has cancer. I fast became my mums nurse, taking her to appointments, scans, radiotherapy, chemo was by mouth so i became very knowledgeable about her drugs and i lost myself. Photography became a lifeline, a crutch that has helped me through so many things, while mum was well and the kids in school my husband and i would drive off for the day, just the two of us and pick a destination about an hour from home, here we could relax, be ourselves and i could take beautiful landscape photographs, no people allowed!

Fast forward to the present, im grieving and Covid strikes, no more trips out, forced to stay at home and there is that voice in the back of my mind, ‘Karen you don’t want to do this anymore’. Throughout the pandemic i have been very lucky to have the support of three incredible sources, the Wirral Chamber of Commerce, the Visual Artists Society and Independent Wirral, the webinars they have put together have been amazing and much needed. Every week there seems to be something to participate in and i have increased my knowledge base in social media, business, art practices and much more.

You know when every day is the same and it gets so frustrating? I was up to the point where i was considering wearing my pj’s all day, bored with life, a little voice getting louder in my head telling me things needed to change, i needed change when i booked a strategy meeting through the VAA with Karen van Hoey Smith. I didn’t know what to expect, Karen had spoken on several webinars i had seen and to be honest i felt she was rather intimidating with her knowledge and background. Our meeting came around and i hadn’t prepared anything for a strategy meeting but i took the bull by the horns and started just talking to her about my life. Towards the end of our 2 hour session Karen looked at me and changed my life! She had put 2 + 2 together and made 4, not 3 not 5 and having put all of the pieces together she made the analogy of me being a caterpillar pupating into a butterfly.

Yes it really is time for change, just like that voice is telling me. Why? Because i have used creating landscape photographs with no people in them as a way to decompress from the hospital visits and constant care for my mum, to be alone with no more people around me and now with the voice in my mind whispering ‘change matters’ i am pupating! turning to mush to create a beautiful butterfly that will fly far and wide photographing PEOPLE! My grief process has led me full circle and now i am slowly recognising that there are no people being forced into my life to crowding me and i am free to seek them out for myself. That is why the voice in my head has been telling me i need something new, something with human contact, why i am drawn to portraiture and why my mind has been recreating the images i want to photograph…..TBC

How Covid 19 is changing my life.

I’m sure Covid has given thousands of people in all walks of life, in all job sectors time to think about what they really want in life, what is important to themselves and their families, time to pause, take stock and realise they perhaps aren’t living their ‘Best Life’. We have ALL had the most horrendous 18 months of our lives and been affected by this pandemic in one way or another or perhaps even several ways. We may have had our eyes opened to the job that has never satisfied, the partner you no longer connect to, the home you never liked, to the life you feel very dissatisfied with and while the pandemic rages around us we find in the quiet of lockdown that we can do something about it, right now while the world battles this horrible disease.

If you have read back into my blog you will know that i have been a carer for a very long time. That i have been the dutiful eldest daughter and looked after my mum from the time my dad died, through her diagnosis of Multiple Myaloma Cancer and ultimately her death. When my mum passed away quietly holding my hand i felt, grief yes but also relief. Relief that finally i was going to get my life back, relief that my husband and family would finally be a ‘normal’ family and the relief that finally i could be who i wanted to be, not who i had become.

Four months is all i got then Covid struck us all. Then i became a struggling artist just like so many others. Our ‘amazing’ government did step up to save our economy, they gave millions of pounds to the big corporations to ‘keep them going’, PPE contracts to their best buddies and family members, they helped businesses furlough staff and financed small businesses but they did nothing for artists! I fell through the cracks, literally, i don’t pay tax as i don’t earn enough so don’t qualify for any help as im not a real business. My husband is self employed but pays no tax as he is quite early in his career as a writer, so no help there. We have been living on Social Security benefits which is basically hand to mouth poverty.

Yes i have a car, its a disability car as i have Fibromyalgia, yes we own our own home with a small mortgage but we haven’t been able to pay our mortgage for months, all this on top of GRIEF, well damn something’s got to give………. Try creating Art when you have energy companies, credit card companies, mortgage companies etc literally knocking at the door, IT JUST DOESN’T WORK.

At first i tried going down the learn it all route and as a member of the Visual Artists Society i have learnt a lot but nothing is helping my creativity. I’ve tried creating with Polaroid film, got a few images out of it, ran out of film, have no money to buy more, that stopped. Tried to be enthusiastic about photographing my local landscapes, been there done that so many times, i’ve approached other photographers for mentoring, they wanted me to PAY! for something i would have done for free given the circumstances. And all the time at the back of my mind i’ve had this voice getting louder and louder yelling ‘I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE’ and a quieter one asking me what do i want and i’ve come to realise its just NOT this!……………………TBC

You are NEVER too old to learn!

Way back in the day, when home computers started to be the ‘thing’ i was lucky enough to be gifted a ‘home computer.’ People these days just dont realise that once upon a time we didn’t actually have ‘computers’ as such, not like now when nearly every home has at least one and people work mostly on line on computers at the moment because of Covid 19. We were lucky, my brother-in-law gave us the old computer from work which was a Compaq, it used ‘floppy disks’ and the RAM was 64K and the memory an impressive 512KB. No one knew how to use them so when things went wrong they stayed wrong until you found out how to fix it and you couldn’t just ask Google! The next computer which we bought was a Medion with a Pentium 3 processor and Internet! Dial up 56kbs netgear modem and emails through AOL, oh the luxury 😉 That’s when i got the bug and started to learn, taking course after course and buying software through Serif, mastering that and after several computer upgrades, Adobe Photoshop.

I taught myself how to use Photoshop when i bought my first digital camera, a Canon Powershot and then a Minolta bridge camera and as i have worked through PC’s, Laptops, cameras and versions of Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, i have picked up more and more knowledge, mostly thanks to good old Google. But i knew something was lacking and as i am always eager to learn new things i jumped straight in when i had an email from Dave Cross inviting me to his virtual Lightroom Summit. Five days of Lr goodness and most importantly for me, learning about gradient filters and editing goodness! It has made me look at my images in a different way and has given me more tools to use when editing them, the hard part is not going too mad with the editing, i have a style that i want to keep, i just want to refine it.

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I’m not sure if your one too but i’m a use it or loose it kind of person so end up writing things in books so i can go back to them, writing it down helps it stick, so now i find myself sitting at my computer all day, bang goes the housework, out go the dog walks, someone else can do the cooking i’m on the computer! I am creating a workflow in Lr that i didn’t have before and i really like it, it makes it so easy to find the images you like in among all of the thousands in my catalog, so i’m creating again but i’m also kind of appalled at how few photographs i have taken over the last 18 months! :0

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This year i have taken to taking my camera with me when i walk my dog Storm but i walk the same places, see the same views that I’ve seen and photographed over the last 12 years and i have itchy feet. I want to go places and photograph new landscapes but SO DOES EVERYONE ELSE and i want peace and quiet not hordes of people escaping after lockdown 3.0. Can you feel my frustration? So i’m staying at home, ignoring the housework, the cobwebs and the young adults that always want feeding at a different time to me and i am putting my head down to learn. Lightroom is first then its Photoshop with maybe a little bit more about techniques using my camera and most deffinatley more about filter systems and ND filters. 2021 is most deffinatley my year of learning.

Well its Good News……..

I wouldn’t say that this year (2021) was off to a good start with Covid and all, but and there is always a but, i have managed to do some pretty amazing things so far. So i had a look at the organisations who have been helping me business wise over the last 12 months and i have become a member of the Visual Artists Association and entered work into their International Art Exhibition which was accepted. It runs from 12th April until 30th June 2021 and i am so thrilled. I have also become a member of Independent Wirral, a chamber of commerce initiative to help small businesses on the Wirral and been awarded the ‘Good to go’ industry standard from Visit England which means i am now Covid friendly when i attend events. All i need are the events and we are good!

I’ve also managed to successfully go out photographing the shore line and i have made several new Polaroid images which i am very pleased about and maybe the best bit is, im going to be a granny again and its a boy! So with all that excitement i have also been able to book several new events over the next few months starting in April where i am going to be selling my art locally in Chemist and Co Hoylake, Wirral on Saturday the 17th. I also have several dates in May and June so far, i hope as we come out of lockdown there will be many more events to participate in, fingers crossed.

You can’t NOT write about Covid 19

How many weeks have we been in lockdown in the UK now? Feels like its been MANY months to me! You know when you suddenly realise you can’t actually remember the last time you actually worked, well that’s me, I no longer recall my last sale, now that is a SCARY thought!

Last year was, you could say, quite a year. I have cared for my Mum for over 8 years as she battled cancer and last year, after being in remission, it came back. She passed away in December thank God as i know she would not have made it through Covid 19. But i hadn’t been earning even before that as i was a full time carer, so when and what was my last sale? Who the hell knows but i would like to know what and when my next one will be so follow the link and have a browse around my FAA website, support the small businesses, a small sale goes a long way. Thank you.

https://karen-lawrence.pixels.com/