Sitting in a crowded parking lot today, waiting, I spied this:
Category Archives: Kappa Kappa Gamma
Today, the Summer 2009 issue of The Key fell through the mail drop and this was on the cover:
This is the first time an editor has used me for both the cover photos and the cover feature story! That’s my daughter in the picture, my son holding an SB 800 Strobist-style to camera left.
On the back cover (below) is Quinn (originally posted here.) All of my clients around the time I was writing this story were photographed as potential cover candidates, but I knew Quinn was a likely winner with those big blue eyes and a shirt to match.
I didn’t realize until recently how much I miss my days as a writer. (Well, the writing part, anyhow. And the reading part; working for newspapers is the only job where you can be caught at your desk reading the paper and not get fired. And of course the off-beat social life. And the smell of ink. And the Glass House notes. And the sports desk that spoke its own language, the photo desk that could come back with a single image that said way more than all the writers and copy editors in the room combined, the art desk that lived in its own cult back there in the corner, the editorial desk that got the phones ringing and all that mail… But the 4 a.m. showtime to write for an 11 a.m. deadline, editors throwing things at me, basement quarters devoid of windows and plant life, that :ick: couch and again, the Glass House notes? Not so much.)
I could spend a whole post writing about the wonderful organization that is RIF — but that would be sort of redundant since I’ve already written a feature and a sidebar and I’m linking you to both.
So I guess the cat’s out of the bag: it’s true. I’m a writer masquerading as a photographer. But today is special because for the Summer 2009 issue, I get to be both.
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Page 24-25
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fleur-de-lis | (also fleur-de-lys)
noun (pl. fleurs-de-lis pronunc. same)
1 Art & Heraldry a stylized lily composed of three petals bound together near their bases. It is especially known from the former royal arms of France, in which it appears in gold on a blue field.
My home is filled with them, the best ones gifts from the many thoughtful and generous people who fill my life. Yesterday, I got a surprise package in the mail from Miette with a note saying she saw this fleur and thought of me and that it was just too good to pass up. I think it’s meant to adorn a bottle of wine, but I draped it on my 105mm instead so that I can look at it while I work.
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My schedule this week is like a jigsaw puzzle; it all fits together perfectly, but very, very tightly and with no wiggle room for errors.
Today was tight partly because this morning, the lovely ladies from my Kappa bookclub met at the Patrick Henry Library in Vienna (we meet somewhere new in Northern Virginia each month) to discuss “The Glass Castle” by Jeannette Walls. (If you’ve read this book, too, I’m interested to hear your thoughts in the comments section!) I love bookclub. I love reading, I love the ladies I’ve met through the club and I love venturing out into new places in Northern Virginia that I otherwise wouldn’t have found. Bookclub is a commitment to remind myself constantly not to skip over the little things that I love in the craze that is everyday life.
After two delicious hours of bookclub, I raced off into life, including editing the photos from my latest shoot:
Kristen loves to scrapbook, and she had an idea for a scrapbook page that she wanted to put together so in addition to her portrait (which was the main reason for the shoot), we experimented with some funky shots. Later, after she got home, she found her original idea and she emailed to tell me LOL that we’d gotten it all wrong! I immediately replied, asking if she wanted to try again tomorrow and she wrote back very graciously that no, she will be able to scrapbook just fine with the images we took but thanked me very much for the offer.
And then she wrote, “You must really love your job!”
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Laura Willingham was a college junior heading to Southwestern Colorado during winter break with friends when she and the driver tried to switch seats while driving. They’d done this many times before, only this time, the two became tangled and the car veered, fishtailed and flipped off the road. All four women were ejected.
Although that moment was years ago, Laura lives with it each day. I didn’t get the chance to photograph her, but I wrote this feature about this Seattle based wife and mother of two, and it’s published in the Fall 2007 issue of The Key. Laura is an amazing person, and her story is one of those profound glimpses into the strength of the human spirit and the capacity to turn pain into hope. Laura’s story has taken her all over the world to help others who wake up one day as she did — an amputee. Her work has brought her here to the D.C. area where she meets soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center coping with limb loss. She is inspirational, hopeful, insightful, giving and strong.
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