WRITER’S DAY OFF

(Originally written for Creative Pinellas, as a Professional Artist Grantee!)

Sometimes you need to put all the projects down, get out of the studio, and reintroduce yourself to the world, even if just for an afternoon.

I recently went on a “Staycation Writers Retreat”, postponing real life for a whole seven days so I could throw myself into my next novel, Sex for Poets. In this book, the main character is a photographer working on a series of infrared film photography. For many years, I’ve worked in various film photography myself, including infrared, but my darkroom is currently packed away due to lack of space. I miss it! While writing Poets, I realized just how much. While I can’t do anything about current space, I CAN pull out some of my digital goodies. I have 2 cameras that I work with while shooting infrared. One is a Sony Alpha NEX-6, and the other is a Nikon 3500. Both have been converted to record infrared light, but at 2 different wavelengths, so they shoot rather differently from one another.

It felt really great to get out of my head for a bit and shoot something pretty.