Here’s to being ridiculous

When I was 13 years old, I had a head full of ridiculous and wonderful ideas. After school, I spent hours poring over the best way to make a lightsaber and I had a few sheets of graph paper stashed away in the back of my exercise book to accurately draw the warp nacelle of my current favourite starship – over and over again (the whole originality thing is a debate for another time).
Yet, in between all that “nonsense”, I managed to become an (almost) straight A English student without ever really bothering to look at the current vocabulary and did a fair job at translating Latin while reliably failing to properly recite the definition of something called “Participium Conjuctum”. Right up until someone managed to bring me to my senses and made me understand that you just cannot treat Latin as if it were a spoken language. Latin is supposed to hurt, they taught me, if it doesn’t you’re doing it wrong. English is hard to pronounce, and alas, a day later, my teacher asked me to put some effort into it when I’m speaking.

During that “high” time, I was accused of being highly intelligent on more than one occasion, but apparently, this trait decays over time. It dawned on me that something was off when my sixth grade German teacher turned eleventh grade Geography teacher asked me straight to my face “What’s wrong with you? I remember you as an intelligent person!”

Whoa, that one hit home. And she was right. Four years of troubleshooting later, I still don’t quite have that energy back that I remember feeling when I drove my parents crazy with deliciously irrelevant bits of Star Wars trivia. If only I could channel that Force (sorry, had to do that) into my present day creativity.

That thought occurs to me in one form or another whenever I “sorta-kinda” take a fantastic opportunity to create. On a photoshoot last weekend, I had everything I could have asked for: a killer location, motivated models sporting gorgeous outfits, better gear than I can handle and a friendsistant (that’s a friend coerced into being an assistant) to go with it.
But, for whatever reason, when my friend lined the models up for a first rate shot (she was taking photos, too), I couldn’t be arsed to move the light I was carrying into position and take the photo. That was after just over one hour of shooting. That’s just one situation in a line of “just-good-enough” performances on my part. Yes, I’m being harsh on myself, but I have no intention to be the guy who is just good enough.

Well, let’s take a look at what did come out of that shoot:

Street Fashion

Street Fashion

Street Fashion

Street Fashion

I’d love it if you shared your thoughts on these results in the comments down below. There are still some model releases outstanding, so there might be a few more photos added.

Coming back to the point of this post, I feel like all this dark musing needs some motivating resolution. “Do some stupid/useless/ridiculous shit again” is what my subconscious screamed at me while writing the first paragraph. So that’s what I’m going to do. And I’m consciously resisting the urge of writing “going to try to do”.

Scamming the text again, I can’t help but feel that this blog that should’ve been solely about a physical journey is about to become one about an emotional voyage as well. Being someone who is used to internalise as much as possible, it still feels odd to put this stuff on the internet, though I think it’s worth the clarity I get from putting it out there. Bring on the haters.

 

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