Wedding Photographers in NYC

3.2.18 - 5004 Cody Street ~ 1:05 AM MT

            Heather told me tonight that she really appreciated my partnership today.  She told me that she could count on me to tidy up the house, to research SEO stuff for Apollo Fields, and that trusting someone else to handle things isn’t easy for her.  Since the beginning of our relationship we’ve always trusted each other because we haven’t given each other a reason not to.  It’s wonderful that that reality is also seeping into the business partnership that we’re creating.

            I know that few people are lucky enough to find a significant other whom they can communicate with, work with, and even enjoy being with for a long period of time.  Often times it’s hard enough to even get along with yourself for awhile.  Yet here we are as a couple in pursuit of a creative endeavor that incorporates and celebrates the things that we are both best at individually.  There are even fewer people who can be part of something like that.

            As I explained it to several people at Oasis tonight, Heather and I’s partnership and eventual marriage was borne out of the recognition of a pattern of mutually beneficial decisions and actions.  To us, concepts like eternal love are irrational fantasies seated in the rationality of the human mind; pursuing them is akin to letting your conscience be commanded by a belief in heaven and hell—it allows imaginary ideas to take precedence over the human faculty of rationality.    

In the past three years Heather and I have taken countless trips, published a cookbook, moved across the country, adopted a Doberman from a sandwich shop, had our Jack Russell become paraplegic, acquired a horse, and fought and laughed in between.  Many things have stood in our way but none of them have stopped us.  Our relationship withstands the things that come our way because we know we control our actions and that we will be there for our partner when they get in their own way. 

            To say that, “we don’t fight” is a misnomer and an oversimplification—we hold different opinions all the time, but it’s a matter of choosing when and where to dig our feet into the mud.  It takes emotional will power to cede your pride in the name of the greater good of the relationship, but learning to govern your feelings in order to foster an atmosphere of trust, support, and honesty will always be worth it.  There are times when I or Heather knows that the arena we have chosen to fight in is a waste of time or that we were not meant to share this same battlefield and we’ve learned that that’s OK.  Our altercations are a matter of recognizing what works and what doesn’t, or what’s harmful and what’s helpful.  It’s less of a fight and more of a concerted effort at honest communication aimed at understanding.

            Through all of the fun and tears we strive to create love and act out of rationality and reason.  It’s less exciting than the love stories we’ve been told and sounds less sexy than the hyperbole of unoriginal wedding vows, but it’s the closest thing to being human that I can imagine.  If Heather and I love each other enough we will bring another human into a world where creativity, rationality, and reason are the concepts dangling above the crib, slowly spinning on a hand-stitched mobile as stubby, wrinkly fingers reach for the sky. Instead of pursuing imaginary fantasies we are writing our story one thoughtful camera click and pen stroke at a time.

The Existential Tug-of-War

3.21.18 - Various Locations ~ 1:41 PM -9:10 PM MT

            I just got out of TIPS training and despite the fact that the trainer was nice, I still think that the whole thing is a racket.  That being said, it was nice to clarify the accepted Colorado truths of hospitality: that you CAN serve someone without an ID and that the police CAN lie to you to entrap you.  The process was pretty painless on the whole.

            I followed it up with fries and a beer at Fate Brewing (highly recommend!) and proceeded to run five miles and climb for an hour at Earth Treks—my stomach felt somewhere between a washing machine and a college party—nonetheless, I powered through and managed to enjoy my calorie-burning.    

            I came home to eat the leftover Blue Pan Detroit-style-pizza (I say goddamn!) and watched a leaked video of Buffalo Bills wide receiver Zay Jones who was naked, trying to jump out of a 30th floor window.  

            Here comes the cliché, “athletes and celebrities are people too” that everyone says in unison when things like his happen. It’s sad that things have to come to this for us to remember the humanity of eachother.  I think the core takeaway of what happened with Zay is that mental health is not to be taken lightly, and that we have to be careful choosing the lens in which we see the world.  Who knows the way Zay has been looking through the glass but it’s clear that he’s hit a critical breaking point.  This is just a reminder that our mental health should always come first because the human mind is too powerful to be taken lightly.

            We don’t even know the extent of the capability of our brains yet we press forward with technology as if we can handle the perilous unknown that we are creating.  There will always be nostalgia for a simpler time but the time we find ourselves in is scarily precarious.  Our psyches are bombarded with information, temptation, and subversion almost every second of every day and we’re supposed to stay sane, confident, and working towards a worthy goal in life.  Not to mention that the information we’re being fed is intelligently crafted to manipulate or affect our very sensitive psyches.  Thus, it’s not a mystery when public figures meltdowns like this—the pressure for the average 21st century individual is enough—without the eyes of the world judging you 24/7.

            For most of us in the western world we lead relatively simple lives even though we long for more. Part of it is our culture of rampant consumerism and entertainment, but the other is that the human mind seems to long for acceptance, notoriety, and accolade.  We go to school, we find a job, and we hopefully find a partner and start a family and in between all of it time passes us by.  We wind up climbing into our death beds wondering where the time went watching the reel of our regrets on repeat.  I think that the human mind is confused, caught somewhere between the comfort of the simple and the ambition for innovation, getting yanked back and forth day-in-and-day-out in some sort of existential tug-of-war. 

                                              At least that’s how I feel sometimes.

            That’s why I focus on happiness in the now, assuring that Heather and I hash out our inner workings to the best of our abilities.  Our minds can be scary places and talking to others makes our own feel less alone.  Sharing intimate stories and thoughts reveals to the world that we are alike even though our insecurities tell us that we aren't.  Sometimes we need to silence the thoughts in our heads to let the words come from our lips to make us remember that we all suffer and that misery loves company. 

            Pain is inevitable in life, but the way we process and react to it, whether we share it or lock it up can make all the difference.  The lens in which we choose to view the world determines the reality before our eyes; let it be tinted with the courage to share the pain that stirs inside you: first for the benefit of yourself; and second for the benefit of mankind. 

Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers

3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT

It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor.  Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words.  Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally. 

Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go.  Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds. 

There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter.  On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us.  But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist.  It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.

As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward.  Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes.  The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work.  It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush.  When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it. 

A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation.  It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t.  It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code. 

There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media.  But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences.  A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.

Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth.  Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives.  It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives.  Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life.  Move forward, not laterally.