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.
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.
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.
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.
Lens connections of Rokinon 14mm (left) and Canon 85mm (right.) Side note – look at the glass difference on the back of these lenses!
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?
Canon R6 menu item for shutter release with no lens attached
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!
Stitched image before editing
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…
Final edit of Orion over the White Church
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.
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!
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.
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.
We have these days, weeks or even months where we lack mental clarity. It’s like there’s just nothing there; there’s no insight, no learning, no intuition, no ability, no passion, it’s just… nothing. I’ve found that when I get like this, freewriting helps me to find that clarity again, just writing whatever is on my mind at the moment. Freewriting can be a great tool to find the mental clarity that you’re looking for.
Freewriting is essentially just writing stream of consciousness – writing whatever crosses your mind; writing whatever is there at the front of your mind. When I’m lacking mental clarity, or when I feel empty, that’s typically when I start freewriting, When you start freewriting, you’ll find that your mind’s not empty. In fact, you may find exactly the opposite. You’ll usually find that there is something there, you just haven’t expressed it in a way that allows you to move past it. Sometimes it might be a thought or an idea that you haven’t been able to process because you haven’t identified it well enough. Sometimes it’s a recurring theme, something that you’re tired of having to process. You may ignore it, or are so frustrated by it, that you put it aside. Freewriting allows you to stumble across these things as you attempt to empty what’s at the front of your mind.
Sometimes I’ve found it’s almost like a filter that needs to be cleaned out from time to time. When I freewrite, I clear that filter. Thoughts that are waiting further back in my mind get an opportunity to make their way to the front, and eventually out as statements, work, ideas, and plans. The filter gets clogged with things that I tend to be able to release by writing stream of consciousness.
It doesn’t always, or even usually, work first time. It typically takes a sustained amount of effort over time. There are days that honestly feel empty, but you still write whatever is there. It may be the word “banana” over and over, it may be lyrics, an idea, or a memory. Just keep writing to get at what’s actually there.
Sometimes it’s just a matter of clearing the clutter at the front of your mind. Sometimes it’s about finding what’s actually there that needs to be addressed. Whatever the case, freewriting often brings that clarity that you may be searching for.
This past year has taught me many things. I think one of the reasons it’s taught me is because it has been so rough, so I’ve learned several big lessons through experience. One of them has been to understand what’s important and what’s urgent, and how and when to focus on each. Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Urgent problems are usually tied to somebody else’s goals. We tend to focus on them more because they have more immediate consequences, so they also demand immediate attention. Things that come up at work that require my immediate attention come to mind. Urgent things usually require meetings and involve multiple people, especially since the goals belong to somebody else.
Important problems belong to us. The consequences may not be immediate, though they may be more impactful than consequences attached to urgent problems. Important problems are tied to our own goals and outcomes.
By thinking of problems in this way, it’s easy to design a simple matrix that visualizes the relationship between the two.
The top right of the matrix is both urgent and important, the bottom right is important but not urgent, the top left is urgent but not important, and the bottom left is neither urgent or important. According to Eisenhower, items that are both urgent and important are highest priority. Items that are important but not urgent are next, followed by not important but urgent, and finally not important and not urgent.
This is a great way to organize and prioritize. If this past year has taught me anything, it’s that not everything is as urgent as we maybe were treating them. This helped me to see through to things that are actually important. I’ve struggled a lot over this past year. Honestly, I’ve found value in being able to complete other people’s priorities. I’m good at doing things for other people, but not so much for myself. It’s easier for many of us to focus on other people’s priorities, and not our own. Here’s another way to visualize the same information within the context of priority.
Thinking in terms of priority, you can see that things that we make our own priority should be considered first. If our priority lines up with somebody else’s priority, then we should put those things first.
I think this is so important because how we spend our time ultimately affects which outcomes we achieve. This isn’t to say that we should avoid service, this isn’t the case at all. We should definitely set aside time to help others with their needs. We still have to consider our practices and our outcomes. If anything, it only highlights that we should be designing our lives in a way that allows us to do both.
Take inventory of what’s important to you. What are your own goals? What outcomes do you want to see? What can you do to achieve those outcomes? Do you need to reprioritize based on urgency and importance? It’s an important consideration.
The other afternoon, my talented wife decided to make our middle child a cardigan. She literally made it in one afternoon! She wanted to publish a blog post on the cardigan by the end of the evening. With just a few moments of daylight left, we ran out into the front yard and did a quick unplanned photo session.
The sky had a pretty color to it in the east – opposite of the sunset, so we took photos in both directions. The light was pretty low, so I had to slow down the shutter speed and bump the ISO to get what I was after, but I think it worked out well enough. These quick, unplanned sessions are a great challenge. Half of being a photographer is getting or making opportunities to take photos, so when the opportunity comes up, I jump at it.
