A Summer Project

Jun 23, 2009 | This Life

Photos always tell a different story than what I see in real time. It never ceases to amaze me the details I over look until I snap a photo. Then, in the still proof of a moment captured, I notice. 

This is mostly true with product shots. It’s only after a couple hundred frames are loaded into the computer to edit that I notice the stray string in every shot. Or the random rake left on the porch that appears to be floating in the background.  If you take product shots then you know, backgrounds count as much as foregrounds. A messy kitchen doesn’t sell your wok! It’s all about image manipulation. Create a wonderful environment for your product and people linger. In fact, it’s the number one bit of feedback I get on Mireio, “Your store is so inviting. I want to live there!”  

Yeah, ME TOO! Truth is, a great product shot is about staging the environment in just such a way as to eliminate the distractions and highlight how fantastic your creation is! Right! Because it is fantastic and you want the world to see that. This is why, no matter how “real” my mounds of laundry might be, they won’t be taking center stage. Clean up those spaces, pare down the backgrounds, and let your light shine.

These details matter, in business anyway. But in real life, laundry does happen and random rakes do float in the background. And staging my life or the photographs of it is just a bit more neurotic than I have time to be!  Which is why I’m always amazed at what I see in a photograph. 

Take the images above. These were shot last week. Boy Wonder and I have decided to plant a container garden on our dilapidated deck off the laundry room. It gets lots of sun and is pointless otherwise. Because it’s off the ground by a floor, we’re not worried about vermin munching on our veg—so it seemed the perfect spot to claim “Victory” and plant away. (Plus, I’m kinda making up for the fact that I took the kid’s “plot” of land in the front yard and planted roses. That was a bad mommy  moment. Ahem. )

But until I started editing  the photos, I hadn’t noticed that the back deck was missed 2 years ago when we painted the house. How did that happen? I mean, it’s this awful moldy earth-to-terracotta flaking mess out there. It should have been the first thing they painted.  Seriously? How did I not notice this disasterpiece before now? 

What I did notice was that we miraculously had just enough old planters left over from the Marin garden to house all our new plants. And I noticed that my child, while totally enthusiastic at the nursery picking out plants, tends to bite off more than he can chew.  Like his mother. He pooped out planting after 3 containers and left the rest to me. But he loves watering and so that’s all good. Every morning he’s out there crowing over the growth. Mostly, I noticed how much he loved just being together.

I suppose that’s the real mystery of life. We see what we want to see. Naysayers and photographs might tell us differently, but the lens we don to see life through is very much a choice. Not that the back deck doesn’t need painting. It does.  It’s just not the most important thing in the picture.

Nineteen

Jun 16, 2009 | This Life

Tonight marks our 19th wedding anniversary. It has become my custom on this blog to write on the subject each year — it’s always a glimpse into my understanding of this thing we call marriage as well as a love letter to the man the universe brought into my life. However, tonight, I am having difficulty finding words.  They are there, bubbling just below the surface, waiting but not ready to be written. It might be, in part, because we aren’t actually celebrating until the weekend—so this milestone doesn’t seem quite real yet. I will write, I promise. After nineteen years I have some words to say. Just not tonight. 

But, I didn’t want to let the evening go without some acknowledgment. Despite our plans for the weekend, IZ still proffered a beloved bottle of champagne this evening.  And as we sat on the porch drinking in the view and marveling over this amazing journey we call marriage, I remembered a post I wrote several years ago on the subject.  It’s not the same as writing something new—but I think, if you read it, you’ll understand why I consider these words the truest I’ve ever written. They were true then. They are true tonight, perhaps even more so. 

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