Sunset at the Oregon Beach

Ebb and Flow

Photography has been an ebbing and flowing endeavor in my life for the past 11 years. It is now the beginning of the busy season for outdoor photography in the Pacific Northwest. Portland, Oregon has about 2-3 beautiful months of consistent sunshine and bearable weather and then 9+ months of grey and wetness. I am excited to be breaking in a new camera at the beginning of the season this year. This was my first session with the upgraded equipment. This SW Portland home had a flood of natural light which made for a great exposure. Every time I try to incorporate artificial lighting into my work, I am just not pleased with the results. Some photographers have it down, but I would say that my style calls for the simplicity of less equipment, less posing, and more focus on the feeling between family members. I like to capture natural moments where my subjects can just be themselves, without the added stress of looking just right while waiting on me. This family was full of cuteness. S...

The Next Brene Brown

The other day I told my story in depth to another new therapist that I've been seeing for a couple months now. It was shared without tears, stated without question, spoken matter of factly. After I was done filling in the details, she stopped me and said, "I understand better now. In your charts it says you had a psychotic break, and I want to be sure that you understand now that you didn't just have a psychotic break, you suffered deeply from PTSD, which lead into a state of psychosis." God, I love my new therapist. She went on to explain that as we tell our stories and start to open up about the traumas that we have suffered through, we begin to understand better and normalize tragedies that women (and men too) everywhere face. We begin to understand that there hasn't been something wrong with us, but there was a lot of wrong done to us. I said, "Yeah, Brene Brown also had a break down and look where she is now!" She is doing so much great work that im...

Hello Neighbor(s)

Get creative. Be bold. Do uncomfortable things. I am in a season of returning to me. All rough and tumbly on the outside, but back to the core center of who I have always been. Years ago, (in my stay at home moming era) I used to be really friendly to my neighbors, because, well, I could. I had the bandwidth. So many awesome connections with extraordinary people were made that way. Both, lifelong friends and memory holding (now distant) connections still remain. But life happened. You know how it goes. It just gets faster and more complicated and busier and (damn) more painful. And sometimes when life gets painful, all we can do is retreat. So I did. The pandemic helped a lot with that drawing into myself process. When the world shut down, it was actually a really big relief to me in the beginning. I could let go of so many things I felt responsible for because every single thing stopped (just about). I had no excuses to not cut out the unnecessary chaos because there was SO much neces...

Crystal the Artist

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