I took MANY photos on our visit in an effort to wrap my arms around the beauty of this place, but I am afraid they really do not fully represent the magnificence that is Big Sur. I am also afraid you are going to have be that family member who gets roped into viewing my vacation photo albums. I hope you do not mind. :)

Oh, and if you stick with me, near the end is really grainy cropped photo of a whale that we saw cruising near the shoreline. Again, my attempt to wrap my arms around the beauty of this place…

There are many viewing stops along this stretch of the PCH. And you can’t just stop at one, you feel the need to stop at all of them.

Tourists, just like me. (I shared similar iphone shots of the above and below photos on Instagram.)

My son found this rocky perch and created a little seating area. The fact that he is in this photo with me, smiling, is proof that he does love his mama!

So there’s a story about the photo below. In January I was in a photo art gallery in Carmel that was dedicated to photographers who strictly shot in film. I fell in love with a photo by an amazing photographer, Robert Taylor who photographed a slice of the Big Sur shoreline with his very large medium format camera. The photo in the gallery was massive, and amazing and I put it on my bucket list to purchase the print (the print alone was like $1200) someday and hang it in my home. So after our visit to Big Sur I came home and was scrolling through my own photos and this one below seemed familiar. I found the Robert Taylor print online and compared them. It was the same slice of Big Sur. This is a very popular spot for photographers so I am not surprised, but I am still longing to own Mr. Taylor’s print. There is something about his black and white and the quality of the film print over the digital. Someday….

My family has a thing for dune jumping…

Can you spot the whale?

I know, a random palm tree. That’s what I thought. A palm tree isn’t really native to this stretch of the coastline. It was imported here by an heiress who built a home on this mountain side. I’m standing on the remains of her patio looking out at her private beach. Seriously, can you imagine owning a slice of heaven?

Now can you see why I am vowing to return to this place?

I was subbing in a class this week and as I was directing the kids to clean the classroom for Open House I noticed a kid who was walking around, doing nothing, so I said to him, “D. You need to go clean your cubby because it’s a disaster.” And he looked at me and said, “I don’t clean.” So I said to him again, “You need to go clean you cubby out right now.” And he said to me, “I don’t clean.” I looked him with my stern teacher eyes and said, “Today is the first day of your ever-lovin’ cleaning life.” (He cleaned.)

I listen to “Girl’s Just Wanna Have Fun” a gazillion times because Bean is participating in her school’s variety show with a few of her girlfriends and she feels the need to practice every second of the day even though the show is in two weeks.

I almost passed out when I saw an Instagram photo of giant smooshed black widow. I’ve lectured people on this foul use of Instagramming before. I am not sure I can take it anymore. I am beginning to develop a Insta-scrolling phobia.

We had a plumber come out to see what was wrong with our toilet. Tree roots had grown up through the bathroom floor under the toilet and back down into the pipes. I’d show you a photo, but then you would regret it.

I tried on some running shoes at a store and came home to buy them on Amazon because I had a gift card and some credit but Amazon did not carry the color I wanted.

I walked out to my car one afternoon and discovered a big fat lizard, with half of a tail, sitting in the middle of my garage floor. (I’m serious, something is GOING ON!!)

Bean asked me if I wanted to lay in bed and watch cute kitty videos on youtube and I turned her down.

My husband’s car did not pass its smog test. Of course. Because I have $500 to fix the problem.

I incurred a late fee on my husband’s car registration because of said smog-passing issue.

I let my son drink the left over garage sale/bake sale pink lemonade for breakfast.

I tried a free work-out video this week. Could not walk for days.

Bean told me that we don’t have enough Jello in the house.

I forgot to renew Bean’s library books.

I burnt egg on the stover burner.

I disappointed some people.

I forgot to take my vitamins.

I longed for summer.

I slept horribly.

I paid bills.

I cried.

I overexposed this photo.

I do not know where I heard this piece of wisdom regarding friendship, but it has stuck with me for years…

When faced with a conflict or a rough patch, a true friend is someone who is willing to go under the surface of the issue and travel through the tunnel with you to sort out, and own, the hard stuff. That friend is willing to do what it takes to come out of the other side with you.

This image for me has always come to mind when my husband and I have hit a rough spot, or when I am nervous about sharing my feelings with a dear friend for fear of creating waves, or hurting her feelings. I am a big peace maker; I love me some good harmony. Ugh, I do not enjoy conflict, or creating it. However, conflict sometimes finds me because, frankly, relationships are made up of imperfect people. How can anything with flaws run seamlessly?

So, when a conflict does confront me, say in my marriage, or in a close friendship I think of this tunnel image and I ask myself:

Am I going to be a person who is willing to go through the tunnel and emerge from the other side?

Am I willing to be the person who does the hard, grueling work of owning her stuff, apologizing, or sharing my feelings?

I have a handful of people in my life in which time and history have proven that when we do hit those tunnel moments, scary as they may be, we have emerged healthier and wiser and more connected than before. And so when those times do arise I remind myself that their hearts hold nothing but love for me. Though our feelings may seem yucky at the moment, I can trust their hearts and their good intentions. Ultimately it is their love for me that compels them to work things out, whatever it takes.

Sadly, there has also been a couple of times in my life in which a friendship’s tunnel journey has never ended. The two of us are caught spinning our wheels, unable to emerge. The issues grow blurry. We give up. Or one of us gives up. Or one of us is emotionally unable to work her/his stuff out to the point where we can exit stronger and healthier. It’s a painful experience to admit that a relationship has failed to survive the darkness of a tunnel.

Over the last several months I have shared these very thoughts with my Bean. The girl drama crap stuff at school has finally touched her shores and interrupted her happy elementary school years. I have had to log in plenty of over-time hours listening to her vent and cry, offering her arms of comfort….and holding my tongue. Lordy, I cannot tell you how hard it is to not play mama bear. Trying to explain the reality of relationships to my little ten year old girl seems somehow so unfair. (Can’t we all just be happy and play Barbies and color in our coloring books?) But I do want her to know this stuff now, not when she is stuck in a toxic relationship with a boyfriend, or roommate, or marriage partner.

It has been hard on this mama watching her hurt over things that have been done to her unfairly. It has been hard watching her make choices and navigate relationships, finally confessing to herself and to me that she is unhappy with some friendships, hurt, confused. I have watched her work hard at being that person who is willing to enter the tunnel and yet be met with rejection. Which becomes another teachable moment: sometimes a person’s crap stuff is so stinky that she is incapable of knowing how to move through the tunnel with you. In those cases, sometimes you unfairly become the object of gossip, manipulation, and petty emotional game playing. I confess, there have been times in which I have just wanted to move away and let her start over. It would just be so much easier. Or so I’d like to believe.

I am fully aware that the relational lessons I am attempting to teach my Bean are ones that I am still learning myself. I have to stop and realize that the girls around her are exactly that–they are ten and eleven year old girls. And to expect adult-size maturity from all of them is pretty unreasonable. (I keep reminding myself of this when I hear about the petty stuff they argue over.) But something amazing has happened to my Bean as we near the end of this school year. It is something that has profoundly moved me and taught me.

As I watch her working hard at being a healthy friend–facing rejection, standing up to manipulation, remaining neutral in the gossip zone, attempting to stay out of other’s problems–I have seen her grow like a weed, emotionally and mentally. She blows me away with her ability to observe what is going on below the water line of the relationships around her. She plops in the car after school and shares with me her day, her problems, and she frequently beats me to articulating the underlying issues. Some might say that she learned this stuff from me, but honestly she has had this 6th sense every since she could talk. Even though I have seen her fumble her way through, make some blunders, I wish I had half of her wisdom when I was her age.

Her tunneling has taught me two things:

A friend is someone who does not wait to see if the other will enter the tunnel first. A friend takes the first scary step. (I have seen her take some scary steps.)

And more importantly:

The experience of the relational tunnel is never wasted…even if you are the only one who emerges from it. (Her growth is proof of this.)

How humbling to be taught these truths by the example of my ten year old daughter.

One day over spring break Bean and I took my mom to our favorite nursery up near Half Moon Bay. On the way back I took the frontage road along the freeway so we could stop at this place, a grecian-style water temple erected over where the Hetch Hetchy reservoir water is brought down from the Sierra Nevadas and into the San Francisco Bay Area.

I took a million other photos of it but there is something about standing underneath it, up close, that makes you want to wrap your arms around it and never leave it. It is incredibly peaceful to walk through the enormous Greek columns and hear the sound of the water rush underneath you.

I know this sounds obvious, but sometimes it is good to stand back and see something–a problem, a goal, an idea– from a distance so you can appreciate the fuller picture and see it in its proper context. There are always moments in our lives when we lose perspective because we are so inundated with the details that we fail to step back and see that something from front to end, side to side.

But then there are times when you must arise from your same old one-shot perspective and zoom in with your feet, come and stand underneath it, feel its texture and climb all over it, wrap your arms around it and attempt to become one with it. Becoming familiar with the parts gives you a better understanding of the whole. (I know that standing underneath this water temple certainly gives me a perspective of just how small I am in comparison to it.)

I guess what I am saying is that the process of learning and problem solving requires both, don’t you you think?

This week my husband was in Spain on business. Which is a crazy statement for me to make because there was a time when he did not even have a full time paying job and we were desperate for stability and a steady income and a good housing situation. So if someone had told us back then that we were not to worry about our future because in two years time he would be traveling to Spain on a business trip to meet with some other business-y people who valued his thoughts and abilities (and would pay him a good income for them) we would have looked incredulously at that person because the very idea of making the statement “my husband is in Spain on business” seemed so far fetched. Of course when you are smack in the middle of adversity it’s really hard to imagine anything else but the sucky life you are currently living, even though you dream of some miraculous job landing in your lap.

So he was gone for the week and I did this parenting thing on my own, which, five years ago, would have brought me to the edges of my sanity. My kids were much smaller and needier back then and so were my coping skills. But now that my kids are older and more independent there are parts of parenting that are just easier and require less energy, such as  bedtime and meals. (Other parts require more energy, such as in the emotional/relational department. I am now working on strengthening different coping skills.)

Anyway, this week was remarkably quiet…

I took a trip to IKEA and spent only $8. (Pretty amazing, I know.)

I drove over the hill into Santa Cruz to see one of my BFF’s and we went for a walk along the harbor and out to the lighthouse and onto the beach. (The weather was beautiful and it made me anxious for summer.) Then we grabbed lunch at one of my favorite yummy places to eat.

I worked on some photos while listening to my favorite Pandora stations. (Brandi Carlile or Ray LaMontagne)

I actually watched a couple of tv shows on Hulu. I got sucked into the entire season of Nashville a while back so I was able to get caught up this week. (I will be bummed if the powers at the top do not renew the show for a second season.)

I went to bed fairly early, even though I had to fight with the Bean for covers and bed space. She takes her dad’s business trips as opportunities to move into his side of the bed. Literally. Yesterday she had snack dishes and cups on his bedside table. There were Barbies and stuffed animals in the bed and littered around the floor. All of her dirty laundry from the week was also on the floor by the bed. It was like she just moved her bedroom into mine, while her bedroom stayed perfectly clean all week.

I, however, enjoyed a clean kitchen the entire week. I was a drill sergeant about not leaving dirty dishes in the sink. There’s something about a clean kitchen that makes life seem so much more do-able.

I finally got my hair cut. And highlighted. While sitting under the hair dryer I read “Us” and “Star” magazine. (Which, btw, I never knew that those magazines bordered on the National Enquirer way of “truth” telling. They site a lot of unnamed sources. A lot of “friends close to the celebrity”. Really? Who are those “friends”? I’m thinking Jennifer Anniston needs new friends.)

And I actually made dinner every night for the kids. Usually I resort to mac and cheese and hotdogs, or let the kid fend for themselves. But I actually made dinners and we sat down all together to eat. I know, I surprise myself sometimes. Be impressed.

As I type this my husband is on his way home from the airport. I have no idea where his body clock is going to be when he gets home but I am sure he is going to be dog tired.

Me? I am actually not that tired. I missed my other half, but I had a good week. I’m just waiting by the front door, ready for to him come home.

I remember being on a vacation up in the mountains and coloring in a coloring book…a picture of a little Indian baby in a papoose. I colored the papoose blue and purple, one of my favorite color combinations.

I remember coloring countless pictures of Snoopy.

I remember sharpening my crayons in the built-in sharpener in the back of the big crayon box.

I remember my favorite colors: cornflower blue, magenta, blue-green, forest green, carnation pink. I did not like the brick-red. But I liked the straight-up red, or the even better, the red-violet.

I remember never ever using the white crayon. And always losing the black one.

I remember hating having to peel the paper off the ends of the crayons because that meant they were no longer new.

I remember taking the gold crayon to the back of my mother’s fancy avocado green chairs in the living room…drawing huge sweeping, spiraling gold circles…and then getting asked about it…and then lying about it. And then confessing.

Sometimes I stop and visit the images of my childhood and I see a little girl lost in her creative world. She is cutting and folding and pasting, filling up pages and pages of coloring books. She is sculpting homemade salty play-doh and swirling her paint brush in her cheap water color paints. She has no understanding of the significance of what she is doing, how she is tending to the seeds of artistic desire, causing them to sprout and grow and reach for the sun. She has no idea of how they will bloom as the years go on, or the type of garden in which they will thrive.

She is not worried about who will like her work, or what anybody will say, or not say, about it. She is not worried about what her creative future work will look like.

She is just peacefully lost in the joy of creating for the sake of creating. She is content to be choosing the blues and purples for the little Indian baby’s papoose. Or learning how to perfectly draw Snoopy’s nose. Or using the backs of her mother’s fancy chairs like a giant green canvas.

Because how could anyone dare to disagree with her that avocado green and gold are a perfect color pair?

Hi. I’m a little talking star.

And with that he walked off and introduced himself to all of the others.

There are probably some great lessons in this, right? Like…

Never be afraid to explore your imagination, or be afraid to introduce it to others.

To make friends you must first be a friend! (Said in my best teacher voice.)

Always be alert and ready..you never know when you might catch a falling star!  (Or something like that.)

Stardom comes to those who fiercely grab ahold of it…and beat off the others who wanted it first.

Create your own twinkle, people. (Not tinkle. I actually wrote that first.)

If you see a star, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck?

It’s Monday. I had a crazy weekend. I could use a little talking star to pep me up.

How ’bout you?

But I kept coming back to this one. One of the things I like about editing is that I get to explore my creative side even more. But over the last few years, after exploring various editing styles I have found that I always come back to what I call a “pure edit”. I like things to look pretty realistic. I love being artsy, but when it comes down to it, I am a pretty natural girl and I like natural looking things. That’s just me. Editing, in the photo world, really is a “to each her own” sort of thing. After years of editing, I have settled into a comfortable “less is more” editing space.

Sometimes there is a lot of magic that happens to a photo that a viewer does not get to see. When I was just learning photography I would often look at other photographer’s photos and wonder why my photos did not come out of the camera nearly as fantastic as theirs. I mean, I could try and nail an exposure but I knew nothing about editing or presets and actions, or how to render what they were producing. Anyway, in playing around with this image I thought that you might like to see the various ways in which this photo could be enhanced from the original. Below is my “pure edit”…

Below is the “straight out of camera” shot. It was exposed pretty perfectly–or at least my histogram told me so–but I knew that if I enhanced it a bit it could really shine. I used my 35mm 1/4 lens. My ISO was set to 200. My fstop (aperture) was set to 2.2 and my shutter speed was 1/500. I chose a wide aperture because I knew that the street behind her would create a great blurry background (shallow depth of field). This is one of my photo secrets that I will share with you: paved streets, especially in the shade, make for some wonderful bokeh-y backdrops. I utilize pavement a lot for backgrounds. (I have also used dirt, tanbark, and shaded sand.)

Below is my edit with a list of the basic moves I make to (almost) every photo. Like I said before, in my opinion, it is a simple enhancing of what is already there.

First off, I tend to always brighten up a photo using the “fill light”, or curves, sliders in LR. Most editing features will have a brightening feature. In LR or Photoshop I can control what areas I would like to brighten instead of just brightening up the entire photo. If you do not have either of those editing programs, you can still simply brighten a photo with any free editing software. (Of course, if the photo is already nice and bright, then no brightening is needed.) My next step is to bump up the contrast to enhance the darks and the lights. This move alone always brings more depth to a photo. (I like depth.) In LR I use the “blacks” slider, or the “contrast” slider. With most photos I also darken the edges with a slight vignette using the “vignette” slider in LR because it helps to draw the eye into the photo. (Not sure if you know this, but your eye will almost always gravitate to the lightest area of a photo first. Darkening the edges of the photos keep your eyes from traveling out of the photo and instead will draw them to the subject.) And lastly I sharpen the photo. There are many ways to do this in Photoshop or LR. I like LR’s sharpening slider.

With this photo I also added two more editing moves: I cropped it in slightly to get rid of the “noisy” color stuff going on at the top of the photo and then I got rid of the tanbark fleck that was below her left eye using the healing brush feature in LR. I don’t know why, but that kind of stuff sometimes drives me nutso. For some reason I loved all of the other dirt on her face (because it was part of the water-play story) but that one piece of bark felt like a big booger hanging out of her nose. I kept wanting to flick it off her face.

Below is a basic black and white edit. The black and white made the photo a bit more moody, don’t you think? I edit my black and white photos many different ways, depending on the light in the photo and the look I am going for, but for this one I used a Florabella basic black and white action in Photoshop. An “action” or a “preset” is a pre-programmed set of editing steps that you (or another photographer) has created in an editing software. They are “shortcuts” that you program into your editing software to speed up the editing process to get a certain “look” to a photo. An “action” is something you can create in programs such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. A “preset” is something you can create in Lightroom. So for this one I used an action in Photoshop that a woman named Shana Rae sells on her website Florabella. I bought some of her actions years ago when I was dabbling in editing. Now I tend to use just her basic black and white action. I do wind up tweaking with the layers and opacity to get it to where I like it, but for the most part this is the one action I repeatedly use.

The following edit was done with a One Willow preset in LR. The preset was called “lyric”. (I don’t know why? Sometimes the names of actions and presets really are baffling to me.) Again, I tweaked with some of the levels because I rarely ever like the immediate look of a preset or action. I chose this one because it played upon the blues, giving it almost a mermaid quality to it. (You can tell by what it did to the color of the street in the background.) I bumped up the contrast in it because originally it was too flat for my liking.

This edit uses a Florabella action called “Amber”. I tweaked the yellows in it. It was a bit to warm for me so I brought it back into LR and cooled it down a bit with the temperature slider. It has a bit of a haze to it, almost a vintage-y feel to it. Sometimes I like this action. It makes a photo feel very Abercrombie and Fitch to me. Which is funny because I hardly ever shop there. (Hello stupidly loud music and embarrassingly seductive wall photos.)

Below is a “hazy” bw edit produced from a random freebie Photoshop action I found on the internet a year or so ago. (I don’t know where it came from?) I rarely use it, but I thought I would try it on this photo. Once in a while I like a hazy edit because it does add a touch of mood to a photo, which I like, but ultimately I think I prefer being able to “see through” a photo. If you like the hazier black and white you can easily learn to add a “haze” layer in Elements or Photoshop by searching for a tutorial on youtube. Or google “free black and white haze action” and see what you get.

This is an edit using a preset from a company called VSCO. VSCO’s presets mimic old film types. I tried a Fuji film preset on this photo and then tweaked with the contrast and the yellows. You can see that there’s a bit of “film” grain to it. Sometimes I like a little grain to my photos…which makes me think I should develop the couple of rolls of film I have sitting in my closet. 

And here we are back to my edit…

I realized I had settled into a fairly comfortable editing space when I would take a photo like this, play with all the various ways I could edit it, spending hours on one photo getting lost in the editing nuances, and eventually come back to my original edit.

Over time I took note of this process and then trusted myself and my original editing choices.

This does not mean that I won’t ever play with a photo, because as I mentioned, I do love the creative editing process. I have just found that my editing time has been reduced drastically because I am spending less time in my editing indecisiveness. I firmly believe that editing is a matter of taste. If I had to pick one of these photos to hang on my wall it would be my orignal edit (or possible the basic bw). You may favor one of the others and that’s okay. In fact, I would love to know which one you’d choose if you had to pick!

And thus concludes my post for today. I hope it was helpful for you, or at the least, slightly entertaining?

Happy Friday!

I love seeing the wheels in her head spin. Love seeing her bring Life, every leafy part of it, up to her nose and take a good long whiff of it. She is playful and witty. She is a comedian in training, though she will never climb up onto a stage because there is an element of shyness about her that keeps her from being completely uninhibited. But she keeps those around her laughing, commenting on her quick observation skills and her turn of a joke.

Sometimes I look at my children and observe their traits, guess as to their DNA origins…

Those hazel eyes are her father’s. (I love that.)

Her smile is mine. (Or so people say.)

His penchant for math and strategic thinking…definitely not from me.

Her proneness to forgetfulness…yep, from her father.

His need for quiet and being at home…from the introverted me, obviously.

Her need to exercise the crafty, artful right side of her brain…all mine.

His deep curiosity as to how things work…from his father.

Her wit? Oh my, just like her daddy. (The two of them together…what comedic partners.)

And then sometimes you look at your children and marvel at their uniqueness, those parts of them that are completely unlike you, and wonder just where in the world it came from? Though the answer is really not that far away from you if you think about it.

Somewhere in the middle of the X and the Y chromosomes, hidden deep in the spiral of genetic code is the unsearchable piece of their personhood that was inserted there by a divine hand.  You know this because you remember how she came out of the womb with an extra dose of joy infused into her spirit. How she has always craved and created laughter in those around her. So when she walks up to a giant leaf and pauses to inspect it, and smell it, then suddenly exercises her funny bone by playing in front of the camera, you shake your head and chuckle and wonder aloud at how blessed you are to have her in your life. And to categorize this part of her as either from her mother or father is to completely minimize the gift that it is.

It’s in those moments that you remember that , yes, we are the combination of those X and Y chromosomes, but that one-of-a-kind spirit that popped out with us from the womb?

It’s all ours.

There seems to be a colony of sand dollars along this stretch of the ocean, more so than any other area along this part of the coast. When the tide rushes out you can see their little bodies flipping  and rolling as the waves drag them back out to sea. When the tide is really far out you can pick them up by the bucketful. We threw the living ones back into the ocean (hoping that might help them get back to their families) and were tickled when we found the baby “sand pennies”. Of course we brought home our little stash; one can never have too many sand dollars.

* * * * *

On our way back to our beach spot we came across this ginormous jelly fish that had washed up onto the shore. Thought you might like to see it…

Of course it wasn’t as cute as the sand dollars so we left it behind.

(Every time I look at the photo above I cannot stare at it for too long. I’m afraid it will make my way into my imaginative dreams somehow. Yikes. Think about the cute sand dollars, T.  Think about the cute sand dollars, T. Think about cute sand dollars, T.)