Grab Bag

It's not uncommon for people to tell me that I need to relax, take a deep breath, calm down, and focus.    This is an incredibly difficult thing for me to do, especially when I'm feeling stressed.  My mind always feels like it's expanding in every direction at an uncontrollable consistency and rate.  I need to remember to do this, I can't forget to do that, I feel so happy about this, I want to punch a hole in the wall when I think about that.  

I am lucky to have photography as a way to relieve some of this pressure in my head.  I can focus on a handful of different projects, rather than worrying about something I might have to take care of in six months or trying to figure out how I can make something else more and more perfect that I should have stopped working on a week before.  I know, at some point, I need to take a deep breath and focus on one specific photography project to shape it into a finished whole, but right now, I'm in the chaos of the moment.  And that's okay.

Here are a few more thistle shots I've been working on:

And I'm finally starting to face this portrait project I started but never finished a year ago: 

I'm even working on some projects that other people have asked me for:

And at the end of the day, I've still got half a dozen shots that I've worked on for myself, for no currently foreseen particular reason or purpose:

Revisiting Musk Thistles as an Adult

As a kid, I dreaded the summers for a number of reasons - the biggest reason of all being that it was thistling season.  As pasture owners, we had to spend hours upon hours out in the hot summer evenings, digging up prickly angry musk thistles, weeds that seemed to pop up faster than we were able to dig them.  It was an incredibly disheartening task that seemed to have absolutely no end in sight.  

I'm around Lincoln this summer, so I'm able to help my parents with thistling this year.  It's amazing how much our pastures have actually cleaned up over the years, and even more amazing that I was so beaten down by the Musk Thistle that I didn't ever really stop to see the sheer transformational beauty of it.  Here are a few shots out of a few hundred that I took this past week, and I'm sure there will be more to come - because these thistles certainly won't be leaving our area for good any time soon.

The Moment After the Storm

My most and least favorite thing about Kansas is the weather - especially its thunderstorms.  They are such a powerful force that my stomach will always churn every time I see those dark clouds on the western horizon.  But these systems are too incredibly beautiful to not fall in love with.  Some of my most clear and humbling moments are right before and right after a thunderstorm hits, and sometimes I'm wise enough to grab my camera to attempt to capture the handful of minutes of unmanageable beauty.  Here are a few shots after a thunderstorm a couple weeks ago.