In case you want to stop reading now, I will be peddling my latest creative accomplishment in this post: My Gratitude 365 Photo Journal.
This project took 11 years to complete, while I composed photos and culled the best (or my favorites, even if they weren’t the best) to create a photo-journal comprised of an image and narrative for each day of the year. Four of those years were largely devoted to my returning to college to earn a B.A. in Communication Studies, when all I really had time for was capturing the images and storing them on my computer and a back-up drive.
In addition to my efforts in capturing and selecting images and writing my reflections, perceptions, and perspectives, I brought every photograph into my two favorite editing applications — Adobe Photoshop and ON1 Photo Raw — and highly stylized them. I used myriad effects, textures, vignettes, borders, and other techniques to create unique images.
As it turned out, I had to shoot a few thousand photos in order to narrow down the selections that I edited — and I even rejected dozens of fully edited photos throughout various stages of the process, right up to the last day of assembling the book! In fact, there are still 59 “final” images in a folder that didn’t make the cut. Let me also say that in those 11 years I did my share of “personal editing” (I call it working in my refinery of consciousness), and it makes sense that how I viewed the world through the camera lens and during the editing process would change, too.
The narratives as a whole are much like a thick book of prose and pondering, composed of a few hundred short stories and/or musings about each photograph’s inception, its process, and its potential to inspire beyond my own psycho-spiritual panorama, so to speak. Here is one example:
I offer the digital version at $9.99 (USD), which comes out to less than three cents per journal entry. I have given away most of my music and art throughout my life, so I think this is a more-than-fair deal.
The photo journal preface provides a bit more detail about my background in photography and my intentions with the project. And, as I wrote in the online book description, “Expect some silliness with the seriousness, some magic with the mundane, and some deep wonderment with the wandering”!
Thank you for reading.
Gratitude 365 Photo Journal is available as an e-book on Amazon and in iBooks:
https://www.amazon.com/Gratitude-365-Photo-Journal-Autonomy-ebook/dp/B09P2LV97P
https://books.apple.com/us/book/gratitude-365-photo-journal/id1615516197?ls=1
P.S. I’m in the final stages of writing and editing an article that I hope to post by the end of the week. I’ve been researching the specific topic for a couple of years, and it fits in well with my broader view of how our history has been stolen by CON-TROLL-ers, through “creative editing” of texts, technology, and art and via other types of psychological manipulation.