We don’t Have to Conquer the Entire Mountain Range

We often get distracted and then discouraged by thinking about conquering the entire mountain range when all we really need to do is hike the trail we’re on.

There’s a hike in the Superstition Mountains that I enjoy doing a couple times a week. It’s a nice workout at the end of the day. At the top of this trail, there’s a nice view of the surrounding area. You can see for quite some distance in many directions. In one direction in particular, you have a view of Four Peaks, which is about 25 miles away. Between this point and Four Peaks lies a good distance of mountain range, a small village, and a river.

On a recent hike I was admiring the view, and was impressed by the magnitude of what I was seeing. I thought about what it would be like to hike to the peaks I was looking at from where I was standing, and look back to where I was standing at that moment. I immediately felt inadequate to the task of undertaking that hike. I had feelings of deficiency, inadequacy, and failure for something that I had only just imagined doing, and moments before was admiring the beauty of.

Since then, I’ve thought about this moment. Why did I feel such inadequacy? I think about all the other things I haven’t done. I haven’t hiked the Grand Canyon rim to rim yet. My wife is a seamstress, and she told me that I could sew my own pair of shorts, a pair that I particularly like, once she teaches me. I haven’t done a triathlon. There’s an entire list of things (much longer than what I’ve listed here) that I haven’t done, and now you can add this hiking trip to Four Peaks from the Superstition Mountains to it. When I consider this list, it makes me feel like a loser.

It occurred to me that I was on a hike that I particularly enjoy. While it’s not 100 miles long with 3,000 ft. in elevation gain, it is a good challenge at the end of the day. It allows me to take time to meditate, journal and watch the sunset from a point above the city with very few people, if anybody, around. It’s an experience that fills me with both wonder and appreciation. Why should I allow my feelings of inadequacy to prevent me from feeling appreciation?

When I think about it, we don’t have to conquer the entire mountain range, we just have to hike and enjoy the trails that we’re on. When we consider the entire mountain range, and judge our inadequacy, we get distracted from the hikes that we can do, and the hikes that we will enjoy. We become so overwhelmed that we don’t even consider the other hikes that we’ll enjoy and the moments we’ll get lasting value from.

This view has become a metaphor for how we view life. It doesn’t present a challenge that reveals inadequacy. Instead, it reveals almost limitless opportunities for growth, enjoyment, and adventure. We don’t have to conquer the entire thing to have value. Instead, we can focus on the trails and the opportunities in between. It doesn’t mean that conquering the entire range isn’t a viable goal, but it doesn’t have to distract or discourage us from what we’re doing now.

We’re all at our own place in our own journeys. We all see metaphorical mountain ranges in our lives. We don’t have to conquer them in order to feel like we have value. We don’t have to be distracted or discouraged by what we see. We can find value and opportunity in where we’re at now. As we move through our own lives, we’ll find new opportunities as we focus on daily practices. If we allow smaller moments and activities to fill us with joy because we’re grateful for them, then we don’t need to be distracted and discouraged. We can appreciate where we’re at, what we’re doing, and find opportunity in where we have to go.

This doesn’t mean that one day you won’t conquer the entire mountain range – that you won’t get to that large goal. Somebody earns the Grammy Award, somebody climbs Everest, people lose 100+ pounds all the time. There are mountain ranges that we can and do conquer. The trick is finding the right ones and committing to the daily practices, taking the steps, and enjoying the process of achieving those goals. Just don’t become distracted and discouraged by the ones that don’t matter as much to you.

Senior Portrait Session

We headed to the Mesa Arts Center a little before sunset to photograph Preston’s Senior Portraits. It was fun to get to know Preston a little better. He was thoughtful and fun-loving during his session, which really shows in his photos. We were also able to take advantage of the sunset for some backlit portraits, which are a personal favorite to take!

We did 2 changes of clothes, and explored the exterior of the Mesa Arts Center, talking about life and capturing different aspects of his personality.

If you’d like to book a photo session, feel free to reach out and let me know what you’re thinking. We’ll get something on the calendar!

The Shadow We Cast

I was hiking the other evening in the Superstition Mountains during sunset, and as I stood up from meditation, I noticed my shadow being cast on a hill behind me. I stood there looking at it, appreciating how my silhouette was one with the silhouette of the rock outcropping that I was standing on. I was also appreciating that on a hill, some distance from where I stood, my shadow was being cast.

I realized that though I had been through there many times at that time of day, I had never taken notice of my shadow being cast there. It wasn’t that I had never cast that shadow before, I had always cast that shadow, I just hadn’t stopped to recognize it. It was then that I realized that everybody casts a shadow, whether we realize it, choose to recognize it, or not.

We all cast physical shadows, we’ve seen them, we may have even chased them as a child. I know my youngest son pretend fought and danced, and watched his shadow with appreciation the entire time. But we don’t only cast physical shadows. We cast shadows of all types.

Our actions and our words cast shadows that are recognizable by us, if we take the time to look for them. They’re recognizable by others as well. We can see echoes of what we do and say as they are cast on the environment and the people around us. People may see us, and they may see our shadow. Often times, people may see our shadow first, only then looking for the source of the shape being cast. People may be affected by our shadows, knowing the source of them. Our shadows can have both negative and positive connotations.

Whether we recognize it or not, we do cast a shadow. The question is, where do you cast your shadow, and what type of shadow do you want to cast?

Maintaining Balance

When we think about balance, we often think of it as being something that we attain. Like, one we have it, we have achieved balance, and now we’ll always have it. Here’s the thing about balance though – balance isn’t something that’s attained, it’s something that’s maintained. We don’t just get it and then have it, we get it, and then it must be maintained.

Consider for a moment, a person riding a bike. We first learn to ride a bike, and keep our balance so that we can stay upright. As we learn to ride further and further, we start to take on different challenges. We may decide to ride longer distances, we may decide that we want to learn to jump, do tricks, or ride on trails. We may ride in urban traffic, or we may ride on difficult trails. Each of these different riding situation requires us to maintain balance in the face of an environment that is always trying to throw us off balance.

If we’re riding in an urban setting, there will be traffic, weather, potholes, and other people. In the case of mountain biking, there will be rocks, dips, hills, ruts, even animals. There’s the constant of gravity that both helps keep us balanced, and pulls us downward when we learn too far to either side. We have to maintain speed and approach different features of the environment with different strategies and tactics. We may need to speed up, slow down, adjust our pedals, pick a different line, and avoid sudden obstacles.

All of this is to say that once we learned to ride a bike, we didn’t attain the balance needed to stay upright. Rather, we learned to maintain balance in that situation. As we continue to challenge ourselves, we learn to maintain balance within those contexts as well. There’s almost always something trying to throw us off balance when we ride.

The same holds true for our lives. Balance isn’t something that we attain, and then we’re good. We must maintain that balance. That may mean leaning further into something or adjusting our approach from time to time. It won’t always be the same. We may need to speed up sometimes, and we may need to slow down. Just because it doesn’t look the same as it did before, or just because you know something is going to have to change, doesn’t mean it’s still not balanced. As long as you’re trying to keep things balanced, it’ll happen. Keep at it. You may fall from time to time, but that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. You can get back up and keep riding.

Lessons of a Simple Pebble

I’ve been meditatively studying this simple pebble. I picked it up out of the rocks on the side of my house. It’s nothing special, just an ordinary pebble. As a challenge, I grabbed it and cleaned it up a bit, put it on my desk, and deeply examined and studied it. I studied it for about a month, almost every day. I looked at it from different directions, I studied each of the indentations and imperfections in it. I thought deeply about this pebble, I photographed it, and this simple pebble taught me a few things.

Appreciation

First, I learned to appreciate this pebble in a way that I would not have otherwise. But, this is only because I paid deep attention to it. My attention on this pebble gave me an appreciation for it’s imperfections, it’s different surfaces, and its features. I found things to appreciate about it, which was not what I expected when I started this exercise.

This made me wonder, what other things in our lives would we gain a greater or deeper appreciation for, were we to choose to pay closer attention to them? How often do we take for granted, or even ignore, the things that are around us? If we were to pay deep attention to them, we would find things to appreciate about them. We collect so much information on a daily basis from so many sources – social media, YouTube, books, movies, shows, interpersonal relationships. We cast a wide net, but how often to we set out to appreciate a single thing, deeply?

Balance

I found that this pebble has many surfaces that can cause it to stay stationary. The surface that is to the table in this photo has this notch that sticks out that allows the pebble to find balance in several positions. This certainly isn’t what I would have imagined, had I just seen this pebble on the driveway, then kicked it back into the rocks.

It made me think about our own balance. How often do we assume that we can only find balance in a particular position? How often do we strive for an imagined balance, not knowing what we’re capable of? Even if balance is temporary (which all balance is), we are capable of maintaining balance given different circumstances.

Balance is maintained, it is not attained. It’s like riding a bike. We maintain balance within the given situation. Whether we ride in the rain, in the wind, in traffic, on a mountain or desert trail – we maintain balance. The positions from which we can personally maintain balance are even more varied than this pebble. If this simple pebble can maintain balance in a variety of positions, we can maintain balance in more positions than the single position that we imagine.

Imperfections

As I examined the imperfections on the pebble, I found myself wondering what had caused them. Was it contact with other rocks? Was it my foot, my tires? Was it the process of creating the rock? Was it a rake or a shovel?

I started thinking of all of my imperfections, and of the imperfections of those around us. I often wonder how somebody could love me despite my imperfections. When it comes to the imperfections of others, there are imperfections that we’re willing to accept, and some that we have trouble looking past. But when they’re viewed as features, just as they are on this pebble, they’re just traits of the person. I’m not accepting of this pebble despite it’s imperfections, or even because of them; they just are part of the pebble, and I accept the pebble as it is. Taking time to see the pebble for what it is, with imperfections and all, makes me think about accepting people the same way – not because of their traits, or even despite their traits, but just accepting the person as they are.

Awareness

My intention was not to judge this pebble, but to study it. Studying it gave me a deeper awareness of it. I wasn’t judging it based on any of it’s merits, even if I did gain an appreciation for it. Gaining an awareness for it helped me to recognize its merits.

I think it’s the same with people. As we gain an awareness for the people around us, we begin to gain an appreciation for them. As we gain an appreciation of them, we become more forgiving, empathetic, and compassionate.

Think Deeply

We cast such a wide net – we get information from so many places, all around us, all the time. It’s important to take some time to think deeply about things as well. Don’t be afraid to study deeply as well as widely. Who knows what you might learn.

Named Clothing Ruska Knot Dress by Koetique

My wife recently made the Ruska Knot Dress by Named Clothing. To commemorate her make, we set out for a quick photo session in downtown Mesa. We chose downtown Mesa because we wanted to take advantage of some of the murals painted there, as well as some of the architecture that downtown Mesa offers.

Part of capturing what her dress looks like really includes capturing and representing her attitude, creativity, and pride, because she made it. It was important to focus on not just her dress, but to represent the person wearing it.

Technically, it was important to ensure that the color of the dress was represented accurately in different lighting situations with different background colors, affecting the tonality and color balance of the different locations. Having that consistency was important in editing, since it was easy to lose sight of that.

Stitched Photo of the Night Sky – Challenges and…

On a clear night in December with the waning quarter moon in the Western Sky, I set out to take a photo of Orion over a little white church at the base of the Superstition Mountains, east of the Phoenix metro area. I didn’t realize it, but I was about to learn several lessons that I didn’t intend on learning. I want to share my planning and the lessons I learned.

Weather & Moon

I planned this photoshoot to be on a clear cloudless night that the moon would be of minimal interference in the western sky. I didn’t want the moon to cast much light into the part of the sky that I would be shooting. Typically you’d choose to do this on a moonless night, but with scheduling, this night would work best.

Camera & Lens

This would be the first time that I was attempting to photograph the night sky with my new Canon R6. My plan was to go out and take photos with my new camera and my Rokinon 14mm f 2.8 EF mounted onto a EF/RF adaptor. I’ve been able to photograph the Milky Way with this lens before on my 6D, so I figured I wouldn’t have much trouble. I also take photographs all the time with my EF 85mm on my R6, so I figured that I wouldn’t have much trouble with the Rokinon 14mm lens. I hadn’t done any testing with this setup before I left, so I wasn’t aware that there’d be a different setup that I’d need to figure out in the cold dark.

When I attached the lens to the camera and attempted to take a photo, the lens wouldn’t respond to the camera. In the dark, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I switched over to my 85mm and had no problems, so I figured it was a lens thing. Because of this, I ended up shooting the night sky using an 85mm prime lens, and having to stitch the photo together (more on that later.) When I got home I saw that the Rokinon lens has a different attachment mechanism that doesn’t allow it to communicate with the R6 mirrorless camera technology.

So the Rokinon 14mm lens wouldn’t respond because it seemed to be unable to communicate with the Canon R6. Some further research turned up a setting on the camera that, when I got the camera, I figured I’d never change. After all, why would I ever want to open the shutter without a lens on it?

I learned that I needed to set the “Release shutter w/o lens” setting in the 4th orange menu to “On”. This allows the shutter to open even if it doesn’t sense a lens attached. Which only makes sense when you have a lens like the Rokinon 14mm attached to it with the different lens connectors. After a few test photos in my office, I can confirm that this works. Now that I know this, I’ll be able to photograph the night sky with the Rokinon 14mm lens.

Photography Strategy

So rather than take a single photograph with a wider zoom, I ended up taking the photo with a Canon 85mm F1.4 lens. This is a FANTASITC lens for portrait photography, but I hadn’t intended on using it for taking photos of the night sky. In order to get what I wanted, which was the Orion constellation directly over the white church, I needed to shoot 12 photos of the night sky, 3 across and 4 down.

While out there, I needed to wait for the occasional vehicle to pass, so there wouldn’t be any light cast into the direction of the photograph. I shot at 15 seconds, F 1.4, zoomed to infinity, 200 ISO. I figured I’d go home, edit them up, and do a stitched photo like I’d done before with other daytime panoramas.

Editing and Stitching

Editing did not go as I had planned. I knew I’d need to clean up corners, balance the exposure, shadows, blacks, whites, highlights, clarity, and sharpness to bring out more stars and not blow out the church in the foreground. I adjusted the color balance, and made sure I removed the lens distortion in Lightroom so that it would stitch well. I knew there’d be some more work once I exported it all to Photoshop too. I did all of that well enough, but when it came time to stich the photos, Lightroom couldn’t do it with the night sky photos. It turned out that Lightroom couldn’t make sense of the stars and do a stitch. I exported them all to Photoshop and tried to stitch them in Photoshop using File/Scripts/Load Files into Stack. Photoshop couldn’t stitch the sky photos either.

I spent a few days trying to put the shots together by hand. I learned that there’s just so much that the software does, and how it compensates for differences in photos. I couldn’t get the photos to stitch by hand either. I was so frustrated because I had to change my photography strategies, but I was excited to see the result. Now I was worried I wouldn’t get to a final result.

In further research I found Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). It’s a free software from Microsoft that will stitch images that are meant for a composite. Since it was free, I figured I’d give it a try. Wouldn’t you know it, that software was able to stitch the photos together with relative ease! It’s image processor isn’t as great as Lightroom or Photoshop, so the image came out a little different than it went in; the image had a strange color cast to it, and some of the spots in the image were lighter due to lens vignetting (that I thought I had already taken care of, but that ICE wouldn’t budge on) but at least it was stitched now, and I could work on the image in Photoshop! I knew how to fix the rest!

I went to work in Photoshop using exposure masks for the bright spots and the foreground, and working on bringing out the night sky a little more with gradient and exposure masks. Here’s the completed image…

Never Satisfied, but Taking the Lesson

I’m never really satisfied with some photos, and this is one of them. I’ve probably done a dozen versions of the photo over several weeks, over and over again. Depending on what the edits are like in Lightroom, ICE will result in a completely different image size and everything. This makes sense because the information that ICE has to work with changes. I think I’ll never be truly satisfied with this photo because it didn’t match my original vision. I’m going to call it done though, and take the lessons with me into future projects.

I’m glad I had the opportunity to learn so much from this experience. Even if it didn’t result in the image I had hoped for, I still learned some things that I’ll be able to take with me into future projects. If you come across this post, hopefully this was able to help you as well.

Quick Photo Session – Bomber Jacket Restyle

My wife (Instagram: @koetiquemade) did a quick restyle of a button up shirt into a bomber jacket the other day. Of course, that meant that we needed to get a quick photo shoot in before the sun went down! These quick photo sessions are a great challenge. I like the idea of making beautiful shots from just outside our home, without going somewhere further away to take photos. So many times we see these beautiful photos in gorgeous locations, but with these quick sessions we just go out on the road and start taking photos, using the location as a creative constraint. We work with the weather, lighting, and what’s going on in the neighborhood at the moment.

It does help to have an 85mm f 1.4 lens on hand. This is a great portrait lens! You can get a nice creamy bokeh in the background with your subject in sharp focus if you frame your shot right. You still have to be aware of shapes in the background that may be distracting from the subject of the photo, but there’s time to play with things if you’re staying close to home. Lighting is also essential to consider, as it is with any situation. But when you’re making the most of what you have, and you don’t have any epic places nearby, you can find ways to make the most of what’s immediately available.

I really enjoy getting out and doing mini-sessions like this. They’re a great creative challenge. They’re also low-key and usually driven by a particular need. If you or anybody you know would like to book a session, and you live in the Mesa, AZ area, let me know. I’m always up for an outdoor, appropriately socially-distanced at the moment of course, photo session!

Why I Stopped using the WordPress “Read More” Button

I’ve always been a fan of the “Read More” button for posts. It’s a nice way to display a short excerpt of your posts, with a button that visually leads readers to click on the button to finish reading the article. When they’re well designed, they actually look really nice, and help to visually break up the blog post archive pages. They can also help with research for which words and phrases help convince readers to click on the button to continue reading (if you’re actually doing that sort of testing.) I decided to stop using the “Read More” button altogether though.

Recently I realized a few things. One – I wasn’t doing the type of user testing for content efficacy regarding click through rates. I’m not trying to convert clicks through to articles. I’m not writing blog posts to convert sales, I’m literally writing blog posts as a practice. I’m trying to stick with a (an almost) daily practice. The conversion rates of click throughs on “Read More” buttons don’t interest me on my blog. It’s a practice for me, and if somebody comes along and finds value in my words later, why would I want to hide more content behind a button that requires them to load another page to continue reading?

I decided that the “Read More” button did little more than hide content for no particular reason. I appreciate the aesthetics of the button, but going forward, I don’t find a practical use for it. I don’t want to hide content from somebody who might find value in my writing practice later on.

So, I’m ditching the “Read More” button from here on out. It’s still there on posts that were carried over from my original website, but going forward I’m going to display all the blog post content on the page. Hopefully, if somebody comes along and finds value in this writing, I will have made it easier to read.

So why the rad dog with a mohawk in sunglasses on a beach in San Diego? Because he’s good with it, and so am I.

Making Room for Creativity, Happiness, and Energy

Life is full of obligations and distractions. There’s enough to do to fill your daily schedule, easily, almost every day. When there’s not something to do, there’s plenty to distract us from the things in life that we don’t want to have to deal with. Between obligation (both urgent and non-urgent) and distraction, it gets tricky to fit in what we actually need. The things that fill our wells, the things that make us better at what we’re trying to do, the things that center us – the things that matter. What we need to do is make room for the things that matter most.

What gives you energy? What helps you to do better and be better? We each have things that help us to be our best selves. We just have to make room for them. What excites you? What do you get excited about when you think about things? These are the things that help you to bring energy into every part of your life. When you do these things, they give you energy, they make you happy, and you feel creative and alive.

Too often, we tell ourselves, “I’ll feel creative when…” or, “I’ll be happy when…” We make creativity or happiness an outcome. Even worse, we tie those outcomes to future states that we may not have control over. “I’ll feel better when this project is done”, or “I’ll feel creative when I can get through this pile of work I need to deal with.” We all know that project is going to be replaced with another one and that pile of work is going to have more added to it. When we make our happiness or creativity an outcome of something that we don’t control, we’re handing our creativity and happiness to somebody or something else. We have to take control over these things that are so precious to us!

Rather than making happiness, creativity, and energy outcomes, we have to create them. We create them by making room for the things that help to feed them. A healthy diet, exercise, our Blue Sky, planning – when we bring this with us every day, we create happiness, creativity, and energy ourselves. When we make room for these things, we feed our souls. When we don’t make room, something else will always come along to fill our time. When we allow them to do it over and over, we lose out on creating happiness, creativity, and energy. Instead, we allow obligations and distractions to create anxiety, low energy, and unhealthy habits.

To have what we really need to do the things we love, and the things we have to do, we need energy and creativity. This helps us to be happy, and helps us to bring our best selves to the things that we are doing – working on our goals, and working on things that are both important and urgent.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t clinical considerations that should be addressed by a licensed professional. If you do have these considerations, you should certainly set aside time to address these with a professional as well. Perhaps in addition though, making room for the activities that help you to bring your best self to what you’re doing would aid in that healing.

Personally, I created a framework and journal that I use just for this. I call it the MAKE ROOM framework. It’s the result of trying to find the best way to organize my own life in a way that helped me to bring my best self to each day. It includes both a planner and journal, so that everything is kept in a single place. I carry it with me everywhere. It really does help me to MAKE ROOM for what’s most important to me.

It may not always feel practical to make room for other things, but it’s more important than urgent. If you will find a way to MAKE ROOM for what’s most important, you’ll find different outcomes.