Ok, and a few color ones too …

I’m just starting to peak my head out of the muck and mire of the past few weeks. The flooding in Nashville hit Keith and I a bit harder than we would have liked. The last month has been filled with watching the home we were living in get flooded with 4 feet of water, packing up what was left of our things and looking for a new place to live, moving into aforementioned ‘new place’, blah blah blah….

However, instead of dwelling on all that. I’ll leave you with an image from a wedding I shot last month with the wonderful Katie Mosley, (that I’m JUST NOW looking at. Yikes!)

Enjoy the weekend.

JUNE 11th UPDATE: New pics coming soon of my sister’s high school graduation as well as some new images on the website! Stay tuned! I hope to get those up this weekend!!

Jeremy spent a good deal of time going through his collection of images and giving us the stories behind them. Having previously seen a lot of his work, it was cool to hear a 'behind the scenes' of some of the photos I'd admired from afar.

We followed Jeremy around while he did a mock bank shoot with some models. He went through his thought process as he positioned each model.

We also watched him do some studio stuff.

We broke up into groups of 4-5. Each group had a model and off we went.

Who am I?

I don’t know.

I guess I have a lot of things to ponder.

Ok, ok. Enough with the Zoolander references. In all seriousness though, I did do kind of feel like that. Weeks later, I’m still working it all out. But I know that it’s time to put on my big girl panties and stop making excuses for myself (ie. I’m self taught, I’m not really that creative, I don’t have all my ducks in a row, etc ).

My time at the workshop inspired me to make my own path, not just try to copy the paths of others – because I’m not like any of the others. My path shouldn’t be either. And that’s ok. Because if two of us are identical, then one of us is irrelevant.

Enjoy your Tuesday!

**Disclaimer- This post is straight from my brain to your eyes. No proof reading has been done. I apologize for any grammatical errors, run on sentences, or misspelled words. I want you to hear my heart, as it is. Misspelled words and all.**

I’ve been reading a book lately about living in a spirit of gratitude. It seems like that, coupled with the amazing week I had last week at both a photography workshop and ImagingUSA (more on those later) has caused me to focus inward on myself: find out who I am, what makes me happy, what brings me the most joy. Who is Erin Alaine? Not who do I think I should be, or what I think other people think I should be, or even what kind of pictures I think people think I should take, but who am I really? Strip away all pretense, all social “dos” and “donts”, all “but so and so does it this way.”

My goal in doing this soul searching is to bring what I find into my images. I don’t want the pictures I take to be just pictures, I want them to be extensions of myself. I want them to convey all the love and emotion (and even fear) that I feel…that my subjects feel. “Well, how are you going to do that?” You ask. I don’t know. Not yet. But I’m on my way to finding out.

To help facilitate this, I’m going to be twittering every day for the next 10 days, little snippets of things that I’m picking up as I’m learning about myself and about who I am. Some of them may be enouragment to you, some of them may be something I’m just realizing about myself for the first time, but all of it will be things that have resonated with me and I am in the process of making my own and living it out.

If any of you are on the same path as I am, I challenge you to do the same. Make sure you @erinalaine me with your first twitter so I can follow your journey! I hope some of you do this because I’m excited for my journey, and hope to encourage you in yours!

Below is a project I worked on for a little bit this afternoon. I was so inspired by reading over my notes from the past week that I had to create something to express what I felt. It’s nothing super fancy. You may not like it. I like it because of what it says to me. I think I’d like to have it printed on a big canvas and hang it up in my husband’s studio as a daily reminder for myself. It’s also my first twitter in this twitter challenge. I’ll be twittering it soon. Go over and check it out!

So far, the move to Tennessee has been good- good for our quality of life, good for our marriage, and good for my business. For a while there, I’d become too busy to even think straight. I was overwhelmed with photo shoots. I was just going through the motions, churning out images. I had forgotten why I fell in love with photography in the first place. I stopped learning because I felt like I had no time. I stopped enjoying photography because I felt like I had no time. Heck, I stopped enjoying LIFE because I felt like I had no time.

Right now, I feel like I’m at the beginning of a season of learning. It’s been a long time coming, and I welcome the much needed time of growth with open arms. I’m excited to fall in love with photography again. I’m excited to learn again. I’m excited to breath again.