I’m a long-suffering, diehard fan of the blog. I still browse recipe, craft, and photo blogs several times a week. I have big feelings about blogs, so it was time I made my own.

In this era of AI and algorithms, art is short-lived. Social media is great for sharing, but it's the last step in a long creative process, and our reach is controlled by black-box algorithms. It's a miracle that art gets made and seen at all, which only makes me appreciate the process more.

Ever since DVD extras and deleted scenes, I've always loved behind-the-scenes content. I capture my process, but it lacks a permanent home. Instagram Stories vanish and Highlights are limited. A blog gives my work and creativity a stable place to live free from algorithmic pressures. We’re living in a world of future lost media, but I’m going to do what I can to hold onto mine just a little longer.

This blog will chronicle the blood/sweat/tears, the weeks of trial and error, and all the human fingerprints I leave behind on each project. This shoot is my first example.

I’m a maker through and through, and connecting different crafts to my photography is so exciting to me. I’ve found Cricuts tempting for a while and the moment I mentioned this out loud to a photographer friend, he gifted me his old Cricut!

I’ve wanted to make my own gobos for some time now. Gobos (go-betweens) are small, circular discs with cutouts that are placed in front of a light source to project patterns or images on a surface. They’ve been a repeat offender in my work, but I’ve craved a way to tweak and customize the projection to create a different feeling from shot to shot.

I wanted to see if the Cricut was the solution I’d been looking for. This January I just turned it on and dove in. I’d set an hour aside here and there for learning the software, reading how-to blogs, and testing materials and scale a million times.

A homemade gobo: Cricut Smart Vinyl applied to a clear acrylic disc.

Projecting the disc by inserting into a spotlight.

I decided I’d use my Cricut to cut out text, as I’d never been able to project anything like that with my handmade or pre-made gobos. At this time I’d just begun to journal positive affirmations everyday. I’m a hardcore scrapbooker and collager, and suddenly positive text was covering all my pages. I even started making these crazy text puzzle collages where I’d see how much copy I could fit on each page.

One of my cursed text puzzle collages about James.

One of my collage storage boxes that I decorated with all the positive text I could find.

It’s true what they say about positive energy – once you start to practice it, you see it everywhere. I wanted to see it in my photography too. In a space like beauty that is always aspirational, I wanted to create something affirmative.

While I worked with my Cricut, my husband James found us a highly niche tool - a Light Blaster for projecting film slides through a camera lens with a speedlight flash. This would allow us to get our projection small enough to fit on a face. However, the surface area for the gobo was much smaller than I’d been testing, and the detail needed was finer than the cricut could cut.

That left me with no projections 2 days before the shoot. Luckily since I live in the best city on Earth, I found a print shop in Gowanus to custom print on acetate for me. I used Adobe Illustrator for the first time to design my copy, submitted the document to the print shop, and biked over to pick up my order, all in the span of a few hours.

At that point I’d already made tons of sketches in Photoshop to visually get my idea across in my mood board. I’m so glad I took the time to pre-visualize everything, because these sketches doubled as my design guide in the eleventh hour.

Sketch

Final Image

Sketch

Final image

Sketch

Final image

It’s always exciting to use a new lighting tool on set. The focal distance of the lightblaster was so short and sensitive that James had to handhold the contraption right up to the subject’s face, just barely out of frame.