I like to follow the successful people that have taken a similar journey to become professional photographers and social media personalities.  Matt Granger is one of those folks.  I'll probably talk a lot more about Matt in future submissions.  Today's entry was inspired by something said by a guest Matt had on his YouTube show, TogLife.  It resonated with me and here's why. 

A few times in my career I've stepped off the corporate curb onto the streets of self-employment.  The first time was simply because I fell into a great opportunity and the other was because I had become disenchanted with my job and needed a fresh start.  It's a very strange feeling - that moment when you decide to leave the relative comfort of a steady paycheck.   Matt's guest on last week's show was the successful Instagram photographer Rob Mulally.  Rob was talking about quitting his day job to become a full time photographer and described the sensation perfectly.  "I've jumped out of a plane with the idea that it's possible to make a parachute.  I'm sort of free falling and figuring out as I go and I'm slowly putting the pieces together."  Rob, you nailed it!  Although, I'm more inclined to fabricate that parachute as quickly as possible - timing is everything.  

Sound scary?  Well, yea, it is.  But is it any more scary than the idea of spending your entire life on this little blue ball in space working the daily grind, collecting a paycheck in exchange for most of your waking hours and perhaps a little piece of your soul?  Don't get me wrong, my career has been a cool balance of challenge and reward and the IT field is ever changing so it's never boring.  But when you get to upper management, you're no longer the guy that gets to solve the nerdy problems and play with the cool tech toys.  You get to supervise all those smart kids with their ponytails and Birkenstocks, and you're now the policy wonk who gets to balance budgets and write reports instead.

© 2016 Images by Design

So, back to Rob's analogy.  Denise and I are gathering up the metaphorical nylon sheets, buckles and cords we're going to need before we get on that plane.  And for me, the flight can't leave soon enough.  I'm actually pretty excited about doing a little macrame at 20,000 ft. and falling.  I've done it twice before and not only survived but feel I'm much richer for the experience.  

In this age of smart phones, social media and "Instagratification" (not my term, but I like it) it's not surprising that, as a culture, we continue to spend less and less time connecting with art.  Art, in all its forms, is meant to be enjoyed, contemplated, and interpreted in a relaxed environment and with our undivided attention.  I volunteer as a docent at a local art museum and over the years I've observed this decline in concentration first hand.  Most visitors today wander the galleries with one eye on their smartphone and rarely do I see a habitué sitting at a piece actively forging a connection.

There are plenty of studies that support this observation with some reports calculating the average time spent in front of a piece at under 30 seconds.  That's crazy.  Museums aren't meant to be conquered.  "It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see."  ~Henry David Thoreau.

Slow Art Day participant, Pat, enjoying "Our Changing Seas III" by Courtney Mattison

In 2009 a guy by the name of Phil Terry started the Slow Art Day movement.  What started with a personal experiment and then just 16 museums that first year is now an international phenomenon with annual participation at 194 museums (in 2016) around the globe.  The idea is for a volunteer host to select a few works of art and have participants spend significant time (10-15 minutes) with each piece in order to nurture a connection.  Here's a photo from Slow Art Day this past Saturday that I hosted at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VaMOCA).  

Connecting with art isn't an activity to be performed once a year and/or only by art professionals.  Everyone should take time out of their hectic schedule on a regular basis to appreciate art in some form.  It's relaxing, its a great mental exercise, and best of all it's easy.  Here's what I tell folks that are new to the experience of connecting with visual artworks.

• What do you first see?  What's the main subject of the piece?  If it's abstract what things could it be?
• What else do you see?  Besides the main subject, what else is going on?  How do these supporting elements add to the story/context?
• What do you suppose is the artist's intention?  Is it a message?  Is it designed to evoke an emotional response?  If so, what emotion(s) does it stir in you?  Explore what about the piece is stirring your response.
• Does this piece resonate with anything in your life?  Does it remind you of a time, place, person or experience?  

I encourage visitors to contemplate these questions before jumping to read the artist's statement.  Sometimes your interpretation will closely match the artist's explanation but it's perfectly fine for your connection to be something completely different.  That's the nature of art.

The Austrian art historian, and student of Gestaltism,  Alois Riegl postulated that art requires three critical elements.  There's the artist who envisions a concept and instantiates that vision in the second critical element, the art piece.  But the art isn't complete until the third critical element, the observer, experiences the piece and interprets the artist's vision. Later, Ernst Gombrech coined this phenomenon as "The beholder's share."

So go complete some art.  Be part of the process.  Carve some time out of your schedule and visit a gallery or museum near you on a regular basis.  You will come away relaxed and refreshed, your brain will enjoy the exercise and you'll be a more complete person for it.  

So far we've just used a working title for this blog "Our Journey" but now that it's published, has a handful of followers, and I'm hoping to draw in a few more subscribers, I think we need a more unique and catchy name.  If you google "our journey blog" you'll discover what I recently did - this is a very popular (and way too broad) blog title used mostly by young couples starting a family.

First, this blog's title needs to convey, in just a few well chosen words, what we're all about.  It's about a purposeful intention to reinvent our lives to achieve our goals.   It's about all the things that need to happen and some others we want to happen to get us there in one piece - meaning, we haven't bankrupted ourselves, alienated our friends or murdered each other.  OK, those examples are a little extreme but certainly those are among the things we want to avoid, right?

Crabtree Falls, Virginia  SOOC.

In my business our approach is called spiral engineering.  That's when the detailed final design is not yet known but the overarching requirements are.  The design evolves through a series of prototypes, redesigns and refinements.  Instead of writing a huge manifesto or detailed project gantt chart, we are filling in details as we go along.  This approach isn't the most efficient way to go, but offers us a lot of flexibility to address what life throws at us along the way without getting frustrated that we're deviating from a rigid plan.  In less technical terms, we see our destination across a large valley.  We don't know the exact route we're going to take but we see the general things we might need for a successful trip down into the valley, across the valley floor and up the other side.

After I read over what I just typed, I see some key words from above that might help build this new descriptive title.  They include: We, Dream, Journey, Purpose, Reinvent, Life, Goal, Need, Plan, Success, Spiral, Design, Flexible, Detail and Destination.  I typed the root words here but many could take the form of noun, pronoun, verb or adverb.  How does one cobble a few of these words together in a creative, descriptive way that someone new might be drawn to?  This is the point where my technical writing background falls short.  We need a poet.  

To help with the poetry I guess we need to understand our intended audience.  Who might want to read along with us?  Well, first Denise and I are using this blog as a personal journal to record our thoughts and actions as we go along.  Like I mentioned before I'm writing this all down to help push us a bit.  But that doesn't help here because we are already subscribers.  Next, our family and friends might want to read this.  Again that's a no-brainer because we just need to show them the link and they'll sign up, I'm guessing.  Then there are folks that might currently be on the same path we've just begun.  It's always been more interesting (and historically, safer) to travel in a larger group.  There are those who are intending to pursue the same sorts of interests as us - maybe a BFA student leaning toward photography or other similar medium hoping to make a career as a professional artist or perhaps someone interesting in becoming a healthy living expert.  Then there are folks that may just want information to strengthen their artistic hobby or fresh ideas for getting GMOs and preservatives out of their pantry.  I guess there could also be dreamers - people who'd like to quit their day job and pursue their passions but for whatever reason don't or can't and want to live vicariously through someone else's experiences.  Nothing wrong with that - I wanted to be an astronaut.  Anyway, for all those potential blog followers what string of words would entice them to read a few entries?  

We also want this title to express our desire to convey information in a meaningful way, peppered with a bit of humor (well, my kind of humor which might be a bit dry or esoteric for some).  A few of my favorite semi-autobiographical books keep popping into my head: "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and "The Last Open Road".  Both are about journeys (of sorts) and the titles are interesting and catchy.  They're intriguing but don't reveal the whole story.  Above my desk hangs a painting of a tall ship in a storm with the caption "The sea is dangerous and its storms terrible, but these obstacles have never been sufficient reason to remain ashore...unlike the mediocre, intrepid spirits seek victory over those things that seem impossible...it is with an iron will that they embark on the most daring of all endeavors...to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown." ~Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1530)  That's a bit wordy for a blog title, but it's a phrase I read almost every day, it inspires me and I'd like our (much shorter) blog title to have some sort of inspirational slant.

So the homework assignment is: using the list of words above, reach the target audience with a blog title that is at the same time descriptive, creative, funny and inspirational. Jeremy Clarkson would say, "How hard could it be?"

The answer, Jeremy, is "very!"  I've reached the end of this entry with no clear title springing from this page.  I'll leave it to my subconscious to chew on this problem for a while and I'll invite our subscribers to take a stab at it in comments.   Help us out, will you?  Thanks! 

I set a rule for myself to post a new entry here every week - Tuesday has been the day I've published most of these blogs.  Here it is Friday and I'm just now getting around to writing this.  It's been a pretty busy week at work but that's no excuse.  If I start to slip down the procrastination slope now, I may never be able to catch up.

I did get a little ego boost yesterday when this image I submitted to Chelsea & Tony Northrup's Youtube show #TCLIVE got a "Pick" from Tony Northrup.  Tony loves to tear apart an image so if he's got nothing constructive to say, that's the highest form of compliment.  It's a great way to get a free professional critique of your work.  Some of my earlier submissions were just plain awful.  

This image came to be because they're building some new homes behind my back yard and I had gone over yesterday afternoon to check out the floor plan of a house under construction.  I happened across this stack of OSB (aka chipboard) with the setting sun adding some nice reds to the amber color of the wood.  The symmetry, textures and colors made for an interesting composition.  Like Chase Jarvis said "The best camera is the one you have."  So, I snapped this with my smartphone. The theme for yesterday's TCLIVE show was "Smartphone Pictures" so I sent it on in.

Most of my smartphone pics worth a damn just end up on Instagram.  If you have clicked on my Instagram link from here you might notice that a lot of the images I post there are not the usual things you would find here in my general portfolio or FaceBook page.  Some are a bit strange, others edgy and many are abstract. I'd never make a living (I don't think) making abstract art like this, but Tony did say that this would make a nice print.  Perhaps I'll send this off to MPIX for a big 16"x20" and hang it in a corner of my house to see if I agree.

It's time to start getting the studio ready for shoots this weekend.  We are trying our hand at some more boudoir photography so I've got some model friends coming over to see what we can make.  If any turn out, I'll be sharing a few here in the next week or two.

One last thing for this week.  I added a feature to subscribe to this blog so if you are interested just click on the subscribe button at the top or bottom of this page so you'll automagically get the latest blog in your inbox as we publish them.

Take Care, and thanks for reading.