Hi y’all!

The calendar finally says it’s spring, and down here in the South the weather does too. I find myself in shorts and Birkenstocks more frequently with each passing day, and needless to say that makes me a very happy girl.

If you’ve followed along on the blog this month then it may seem like March was slow, but in fact it was oddly frenetic. I stayed busy all month long with a handful of different projects, so there’s lots for you all to explore this issue.

Most excitingly, I got my darkroom up and running and began processing my own film. Having to send film off for development was definitely a deterrent to using it as often as I’d have liked, so it feels amazing to be able to do it myself. I really didn’t expect much from my first few rolls. (If I’m being honest I was thrilled just to see the negatives had images on them.) So imagine my delight when I actually loved a handful of the pictures! I posted a small gallery, linked below, so you guys could take a peek. I still have a ways to go and a ton to learn, but I feel like I’m off to a pretty good start.

I also made a trip to the botanical garden this month, and as you’ll see it ended up shaping almost everything else I did. It wasn’t really intentional. But I suppose with all of the chaos in the world it just felt good to try to focus on the beautiful. And besides, now my newsletter has a nice Earth Month theme, so I mean, yeah I absolutely did it on purpose. Hopefully you’ll find something you enjoy!

Oh, and be sure and checkout the playlist down at the bottom! I made it as sort of a soundtrack to my film images, but I think it would make a fabulous accompaniment to this whole issue.

As always, thanks so much to each of you for reading. And y’all know how much I love hearing from you, so write me back!

kg

FIRST FILM

I’d often heard photographers talk about developing their own film as if it were some sort of drug; once you started there was no turning back. After processing my first three rolls, I get it. The first was a roll of black and white, the simplest to develop. They turned out ok, but I didn’t really love anything on the roll. (To be fair, they weren’t images I was excited about; taken only to give me something to practice developing.) The truth was with spring’s beautiful blooms and all of the warm light hanging in the air, I really just wanted to work in color. I knew how finicky color processing could be, and didn’t have particularly high hopes that the first couple of rolls would give me anything. The whole process was like a meditation though, and in the end I was pleasantly surprised. The images I had set out to make turned out exactly as I wanted, and I managed to capture the ethereal spring I was after.

SPRING PHOTO PROJECT

Last month I picked up a copy of Laura Pashby’s Little Stories of Your Life. I’ve only just started any reading in it, but it’s all about the magic we can find when we pay attention to the details of our lives. Last week Laura began a little “seasonal storytelling challenge,” posting a different prompt to use for creating a spring image each day for ten days. I rarely participate in stuff like that, but as we’ve already established I’ve been in spring mode all month so I figured why not. I cheated a bit; one prompt was supposed to be a photo of me, and the way my month was going I knew that wasn’t happening. So I used my favorite prompt, spring light, twice. Still I ended up with ten images I was really happy with, telling my own little story of spring.

RECENT POSTS

BOOK SPINE POETRY

Y’all know I’m a fan of Austin Kleon. I recently got his Steal Like an Artist Journal and have been slowly working my way through it. It’s full of creative inspiration, and has all sorts of fun prompts to get you going. One of my favorites so far was to play with stacking books so that their titles make a poem. Turns out that photo book titles lend themselves really well to this, as do children’s books. There were so many I wanted to use, but I did manage to work in a few of my favorites. To read the poem you can check out my post over on Instagram.

AT THE MOMENT

LISTENING TO

If you hadn’t noticed already the music I listen to tends to be super eclectic, and this month in particular I’ve been bouncing around a lot, mostly between some funky soul and classical. But as I made and processed all of the different botanical images this month, I kept coming back to some of the same songs. As I pulled together the film images for ethereal spring, I decided these were the soundtrack.

READING IN

Well, it finally happened. Reading glasses have become a necessity. Happens to the best of us I suppose. The good news is that it’s made reading so much more enjoyable now that my eyes don’t tire as easily. I’m currently in between books but this past month I plowed through a few, including Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist (the book that inspired the journal referenced above) and bell hooks’ All About Love. This was my first venture into hooks’ work directly, but I feel certain that it won’t be my last.

And with Earth Day coming up I’m thinking I may read Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature. If you’re interested pick up a copy and read along with me!

THINKING ABOUT

I’ve listened to so many good podcasts this month. But the episode that’s sticking with me lately is a conversation with Luvvie Ajayi Jones on We Can Do Hard Things. In it she talks about community, showing up for each other, and how to have the hard conversations.

CRUSHING ON

Earlier this month I received Christy Bush’s stunning photo book Familiar. Perhaps I’m a wee bit biased, as many of the photographs were made during Christy’s time here in Athens, but the book beautifully documents her journey. It includes a number of images of the early 90’s local rock 'n' roll scene and many that speak to the experience of coming of age in the South.