The Dreaming State

Our dryer stopped working, so I was stuck with a bunch of wet laundry. So frustrating. I loaded up the car, grabbed a bunch of quarters, and headed to a Laundromat down the road… Inside I met an old Asian woman who, though she couldn’t speak English too well, showed me around and gave recommendations.

On my way back to pick up the clean laundry, I stopped and bought a bunch of colorful flowers. I loaded my laundry into the car, went back inside, and handed the lady the flowers. “My dryer broke and you saved the day by helping me out, so these are for you.” I knew she was smiling even though we were both wearing masks. She then showed me a vase with old perishing flowers in her office, and said how great these will look… I am not looking for praise. I do stuff like this and never tell anyone. I mostly wanted to share this story because we need more “community” or small random acts of kindness… It sickens me that Asian folks are being targeted with hate crimes because of this virus, but it’s also nice to just spread positivity instead of being mean or ignoring one another. I know it won’t change the world, but it probably changed her day.

I don’t normally take many portraits. Some people, that’s all they do. I don’t really care for pictured of people. That said, every so often I step out of my comfort zone to make something new. We went out to the beach for a fun shoot, but the sky was incredibly boring that day, so I lied. I added a sky I photographed months earlier when a hurricane was passing by the ocean. It made such amazing textures. Let’s face it, nothing about portraits are real anyway. Everyone has tons of makeup on, studio lights, and photoshops out the “flaws” in post. Well, I changed the sky.

I was out photographing and noticed all the bright yellow lines surrounded by dark green leafs, and I knew I had to take this image in a new direction. Years ago, I used to spend hours and hours, over the span of many days, just to edit one image. Now I seem to be drawn to “effects” that are quite simple.