Waking to a Life We Never Could Have Imagined —
When we take up photography or photo artistry, when we really begin to immerse ourselves in the creative life, a whole new world opens to us. And everything changes …
A Video Post, by Sebastian Michaels
Video Note: If you run into playback problems, pause the video and let it buffer for twenty seconds before pressing play again. If problem persists, install the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. Also, note that you can hover over the video to pull up the controls, and always feel free to resize this entire window with Cmd (or Ctrl on a PC) and the Plus/Minus keys.
Transcript continued:
It’s as if we were sleeping … and only now, eyes suddenly open, are we really SEEING the world around us …
We experience a SHIFT.
And the thing is, we couldn’t possibly have seen that shift coming.
Author Sam Harris once wrote of his own clueless youth, when he couldn’t see beyond the immediate discomfort and boredom of his teenage life … even while out in the mountains, confronted by all the grandeur of nature … It was all there in front of him. But he was trapped in his own head. He simply couldn’t see it.
And what he realized much later, reflecting on this, was how “utterly oblivious we are to how different life would be if the quality of our minds were to change.”
Which is why when someone first takes up photography or first digs into Photoshop … and fascination begins to take root … they can’t begin to imagine how different their life is about to become.
When we take up an artistic life, our world opens up in altogether miraculous ways — usually in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined.
My hope for you is that, in immersing yourself in the world of photo artistry, you are finding the “quality of your mind” changing … and in turn discovering how truly different your life can be.
It can be a crazy life. (You’ll feel crazy at times. That’s normal.)
It can be a lonely life. (Non-artists aren’t going to understand you. And some of your old friends are going to start to drift away, occupied with whatever it is those people do.)
But an artistic life can also be a MAGICAL life.
Indeed, it should be magical.
And perhaps MAGIC is what we least expected to find here.
But magic there is. Magic aplenty.
As artists, we wake to that magic every day. With our cameras in hand, we continually search about for traces of enchantment in the world around us. And when we sit before a composition taking shape in Photoshop, it’s a spell we are weaving, isn’t it?
The world we wake to each day as photo artists is nothing like the world we woke to back before our hands fell in love with lenses and the trip of shutters, back before we discovered the wizardry of blend modes and layer masks …
But now that we’re here …
Isn’t it miraculous?
– Sebastian
PS: Thanks to AWAKE artist Catherine King — the feature artist from Issue 4 of Living the Photo Artistic Life — for allowing me to feature one of her images at the top of this post. It was perfect for it. You can find more of Catherine’s amazing work on her beautiful portfolio site here . . .