Erecting Skyscrapers

After years of working at this craft of photography, you’d think it’d get easier. But I find it to be exactly the opposite. Yes, I’ve learned some tricks along the way, but every time I sit down to work up an image, I feel as if I’m trying to build a skyscraper from the top down. I almost always know the end feeling I want to evoke, but how I get to that feeling, well, I’m a lost man in a foreign land with no map and little ability to speak the language. I stumble along, bushwhacking this way and that, hoping that at some point I’ll discover a way through. And guess what, miracle of miracles, I almost always do. Winston Churchill once wrote, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.” Sage advice, as that is exactly what is required for me to create something I find worthwhile: persistence, patience and faith. Dumb luck doesn’t hurt either. With this series of showgirl images, for example, I knew the end feeling I wanted to evoke, but what the end imagery would look like I had no clue. I was just a kid messing around in my Photoshop sandbox, and then I fell into this look and I just knew I had it. It’s as if I started off thinking I was erecting a cathedral, but somewhere along the way it ended looking more like a teepee - and I liked it. Crazy.