you have to discover you, what you do and trust it.- barbara streisand

every time i come home from a photo shoot, i mark my favorites and begin editing my favorites of the favorites. one by one, the process continues over a week or two...

when i got home from this shoot, i marked and opened this photo right away and there it sat...for hours. i went back to it over and over again, just looking at it.

i love it. but why? i know this is a photo that a lot won't understand...or like. they'll probably think it's weird hmmm...but i love it. for some reason.

more time passed. i edited a bunch of other photos. and then i went back to this photo. it went on like that for a while.

yes, there's still something about this image. that i love. i need to edit it.

and i did. a few times actually. and later, when michelle and i were chatting, she said,

what's it like to be in your brain?

of course, my response was,

huh? what do you mean?

i would have passed that photo right over and you've made it a work of art.

that got me thinking even more.

why? why did i connect with this photo, as i did?

after a lot of thought, it hit me. and i shared some personal thoughts with her...

it's the beauty. the mystery. running from our past. a past of troubles. and pain. to a future of happiness. the thought of possibly not having what he have now. and being lost without it. this could be you. it could be me. or it could be someone that's stuck in the middle and trying to figure it all out.

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i often talk about how (for me) photography is more than just shooting, pressing a button to process the images and handing the photographs over to my clients. it's about feeling each and every image. not that every image evokes an intense amount of feeling, but that's part of the beauty of it all--recognizing those that do.

yesterday, my dear friend, erin, talked a bunch about crafting your style--your particular voice. and i so loved what she said here:

style can also be interpreted as a particular voice. what do you want to say? i firmly believe that to have your own voice through a camera, you really need to know who you are as a person. what do you want to say as an individual? if you know what you want to say as a person, then it becomes infinitely easier to know what you want to say through your camera.

find yourself and trust yourself and make sure that when you find your voice, it speaks loudly throughout, from beginning to end. it's definitely a process...finding yourself and all. a magical one of sorts. however, it is also one that will occasionally be sprinkled with moments of self doubt, which brings me back to...trust yourself.

ETA: i have to remind myself of all this over and over again. having confidence and trusting myself doesn't come easy.