Photo Journal #7

It’s always hurt my confidence.
Comments made with negativity directed at me.
I’ve always pined over them to see what I could fix and each time it chiseled off a piece of who I was.
Actions are either made out of Love or out of Fear; in those times, I would respond with fear.
Afraid to lose the approval of others so I would regress back into to a shell too tight for my being.
Finally, in my awareness, I no longer lust for the approval of those individuals projecting their insecurities on others.
When you respond with love you feel loved.
When you respond with fear you get fear.
I know which side of the coin I want to land on.

Photo Journal #4

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt true hate but I know I’ve felt true love.
It doesn’t leave much room for other feelings.
I first understood these conflicting feelings when I was a young boy.
I’d spend hours thinking about my father’s killer and how I’d wish that moment didn’t happen.
Very quickly I realized I would drive myself insane wishing for my dad to come back to life because things don’t work that way and thankfully these mental bouts opened me up to a lot of love (Followed by my mom’s amazing breakfast feasts every weekend.)
As I’m nearing 30 I look back on my life and I can see how cyclical things are.
For the first time in a while, I’m experiencing hate again in some form or another, maybe it’s jealousy or maybe I’m annoying who knows but the bottom line is I have some people in my life that don’t like me and they have made it a point to make that evident.
What hurts the most is that I care for these people and I think we can all relate to that feeling but the bottom line is people like this are toxic.

The best way I can put it is shown in a study done by Yale.
They asked a graduating class in a survey if they would rather take a job after graduation where everyone in their graduating class makes $400,000 per year or they make take a job paying $300,000 and the rest of their graduating class makes $100,000.

Over 90% of the students chose the latter which blew my mind because even if I don’t like you I still hope that you achieve all that you want to in life even if that means you’re doing better than me.
Even now it is still astounding to me how jealous people can be and thankfully I attribute the overwhelming love my mother gave me to my sense of security.
As disheartened as I am to have to deal with 2 people that are really pestering me I am really grateful that I don’t feel the need to hurt people because of my insecurities.

The reason I’m writing about this here is to remind myself to kill people with kindness which is something I wouldn’t have done as a child.
I was once extremely reactive and I’m sure I can still be at times but I’m trying to remind myself that life is a marathon.
By killing these people with kindness now I see no improvement, for lack of better words I’m still getting shit on but in the future, I hope the kindness will float to the top.

One takes "Tulum"

Since I became a photographer back in 2013 I’ve always felt that I have to constantly make photographs.
I’ve always loved that feeling because it drives me to make some of my best work but for this trip I really wanted to put myself first and my photography second.
It’s been years since I’ve had a real vacation because I’m usually photographing endlessly while I’m traveling.
With the idea of actually having no plans and no goals other than to enjoy myself my friends and I went to Tulum for a very hectic week in the sun lol.
The photos I took in Tulum were almost all only “one takes” meaning I only took one frame of a particular subject and if I nailed it great and if it came out like shit then oh well.
There was something freeing about switching up how I shoot and also having no pressure to deliver these images to a client.
This trip was just for me to enjoy being in the moment and not just watching the moments happen.
Hopefully in the near future I can find sometime to write down some of those memories for you guys here.

All the best,
Atticus

Sculpting

As each year goes by I’ve realized just how much life is about doing the things you don’t want to do.
Taxes, bills, emails, paperwork, work, and so many other things to name a few take up so much of our time.
My work happens to be photography and Burnout is definitely something I’ve dealt with from time to time but the way I’ve always gotten around it is simple, I just shoot through it.
Instead of finding more jobs to shoot though I take time to photograph things that I am interested in which helps me reframe my vision and keep up with my editing style.

The photos you see below are of a sculpture my friend (Ian Swordly) is hand carving out of marble.
Having worked with marble countertops in my college years I understood how impressive this was but when you see the sheer size of the stone it’s pretty jaw-dropping.
Thousands of hours get put into one of these sculptures and it’s all done one chip at a time.
Not to mention you need a forklift to move this 1200 pound piece of marble.

The interesting bit here for me is the overlap between all hobbies.
You hear people say '“mastery comes from practicing one skill for 10,000 hours” which may be true but if you put in 1000 hours you’re going to be pretty damn good.
As I say so frequently on this blog consistency is the key to everything.

So if you want to get better at something be consistent and if you’re worried about burn out make time to have fun with the skill you’re learning.
With photography being my job that also means making time for personal work.

The last point I want to touch on is something I heard a few months back and it was called the “2-minute rule”.
This is a rule people use when they’re trying to form a habit but the key is to start extremely small, 2 minutes to be exact.
The person who spoke about the rule had a client that lost over 100lbs in a year by showing up to the gym for 5 minutes every day.
For the first month, this person could not exceed more than 5 minutes in the gym.
The goal here was to be a healthy and fit person and by starting with 5 minutes at the gym he tackled the biggest hurdle of his goal which was “going to the gym every day”.

Now for this guy stopping at the gym every day after work is engrained in his routine.
If you’re looking to improve on an area of your life this year or to learn a new skill try starting with the easiest task first, showing up!

All the best,
Atticus







Snow day.

This has been a tough week for our baby girl Rowie.
Currently, in Williamsburg, there is an outbreak of Leptospirosis which is a disease spread from rats.
Luckily Rowie is safe and healthy but due to the poor maintenance of the dog parks in our area, Brooklyn is quickly becoming a ghost town for places to bring your dog.
So far 4 dogs have already died from this disease in Williamsburg and they expect the numbers to rise.

The biggest challenge we’re having is where do we take our dog to exercise and train that is mentally stimulating for her?

Most of the parks are nasty and the nice ones don’t allow dogs off-leash which I totally understand that.

With all of that being said it’s important to enjoy the good times cause the tough times are sucky but they make us who we are.

Placing restrictions on your creative processes is one of the biggest tools I’ve used in my career.
When I was in art school I thought these restrictions were bullshit and I tried to find every way I could to get around them.
At the time I didn’t understand that the restrictions were meant to push our minds to think creatively.

Although the dog parks are closed Meg and I have been forced to get creative with how we expend our dogs physical and mental energy.
This can only help us in the future when the weather is bad, or the parks are closed and so on.

Don’t be discouraged by the bumps in the road or even worse an entire route being closed, find your own way around them.

Birthday weekend.

The photos featured below are from my birthday weekend back in december.
This year I don’t have any big goals instead I chose to swap them out for small daily rituals and here’s why.

Back in 2017, I started journaling daily.
Sadly in 2021, I let go of my daily writing.
This practice was once something I did every morning from 2017-2019 and most mornings through 2020.

With this practice, my goal is mainly self-awareness.
I want to learn more about who I am as a person the good and the bad and part of this journaling is my attempt at studying what I’ve done that has worked out well for me in the past.

A key thing that has worked well for me is something I call the “grain of sand theory”.

The idea is to imagine your life 5 years from now.
Where do you see yourself?

If you haven’t thought about this you probably should because for most of us 5 years is going to come a lot sooner than you think.
Take the time to write down where you see yourself in 5 years and try to be as clear as you can.

The way I think of this theory is in 2 key components.
Simplicity and consistency.

Now let your goals 5 years from now represent a beach made of sand and it’s your responsibility to find that sand to make that beach.

The task seems daunting and in most cases, it will be but your goal here is to find an activity that will allow you to collect sand daily or in our case repeat a process daily to get incrementally closer to your goals.

Adversely if you try to shovel all the sand you can in one day you will be sore tired and have to take days off.
This is what I call the intensity model which is a problem because days off compound just as much as days on do.

The goal to making your beach is consistency and with simple math, you can see why this is so important.
Imagine you shoveled sand for 20 minutes a day for a year.
Everyone has a free 20 minutes a day especially when it comes to pursuing your most important goal.
In one year you would have worked on your goal for 7,300 minutes.

Now imagine you work on your goal for one hour a week.
That’s 3,120 minutes a year that’s 4,180 minutes less than if you worked on something for 20 minutes a day.

This is why journaling for me has to be done everyday not the once a week thing I was doing in 2020 and the same goes for the rest of my goals.

If you want something focus on small efforts daily and build the intensity over time.

Christmas tradition.

Here are some photos of my favorite tradition with some of my best friends.
To most people, this looks like pure pain but I can tell you it’s one of the most enjoyable and memorable parts of my year.
I’m not too familiar with the science of cold water plunges but for me, it’s all about getting my body to do what my mind tells it to.

When Walter and I first started this tradition on Christmas 4 years ago it was a lot harder for me to get my body in the water.
Now 4 years later there isn’t much thought behind it.
We get to the dock strip down and jump in.

In the end, the goal for me is to carry this mindset into my everyday life.
To end procrastination and to gladly run headfirst at the things I don’t want to do but that need to be done.

True pain is the avoidance of doing what needs to be done.

To end this blog I want to share something I wrote in my journal years ago.
”Seek pleasure and you’ll find lasting pain, seek pain and you’ll find lasting pleasure.”


Make.

In critiques people always ask you why you made the images you did.
I find that to be kind of a shit question though.
Making images is somewhat subconscious and closer to brushing your teeth daily than it is to painting.

At least for me I don’t always want to be thinking while I’m shooting.
Yes you can plan the images you want to make but it’s the repetition of making images that sharpens your eyes.
The “why” doesn’t always come about before the images are made sometimes that happens once you put the images together. 

Rhode Island

Nothing is perfect but what you say to yourself should encourage you to strive for perfection.

Right now in my life, I have 3 hobbies.
The first is photography which is also my career, the second is jiu-jitsu, and the 3rd is training my dog.
Photography taught me the most valuable skill I have ever learned and that is how to practice.
If you want to get good at anything it takes a few simple repeatable actions.

Action number one- is consistency. Practice every day or as frequently as possible.

Action two- Research you need to learn new techniques from other people, books, or the internet.
The more places you research the more ideas you will find and the more you can experiment with these techniques.

Action three- Be okay with failing but do not beat yourself up for it.
I used to beat myself up a lot when images did not go as planned but that only made me push photography away.
Telling myself that I sucked at editing made me hate editing but when I first started it was something I loved about photography.

Action four- have a community to communicate with. Whether this is online or in-person people love to talk about their passions. Yes, there may be a lot of gatekeepers out there who think they have the magic bullet to success in your passion but the people who are at the same stage as you often bring the most value to the table. Beginners and novices are eager to learn and often much more eager to share than experts are.

Action five- is assessment ask people for honest critiques! Ask people that aren’t afraid to hurt your feelings! A dishonest opinion that panders to your feelings is one of the most toxic obstacles to your growth.

With that, I hope you are all getting better at your hobbies and enjoying them along the way.


Ben's Bachelor weekend.

Had the most amazing weekend with this motley crew for my friend Ben’s bachelor party.
It’s not everyday that you get to cut loose with your friends and this felt like a much needed break.
When we first got up to New Hampshire I grabbed my camera and started walking around taking photos.
This is something I do on every trip but for some reason it felt different.
Subconsciously I was pressuring myself to make great pictures immediately and I was not having fun shooting.
It felt like I was on a job and had all this pressure on me.
As I looked around I said to myself “fucking relax, just take what you feel.”
In that moment I let go of the idea of taking compositionally sound images, I stopped worrying about aesthetic, and I just took photos of what felt good to me.
Down time needs time down time, and work time needs to be work time.
I think you can have fun with both but they need to be treated appropriately.

Once I let go of this notion I picked up my camera whenever it felt right to me throughout the trip.
The photos I was taking were only for fun and it felt symbolic being with my childhood best friends and returning to a simpler form of photography.

In short the end result isn’t always what’s most important it’s the process of making over and over again and still enjoying it.

I’m grateful for these days and the people I am able to spend them with.

Bitching doesn't help anything.

Has there ever been a time where all you wanted to do was bitch about your life?
Yeah we have all been there and today after a few days with minor inconveniences I let it all out.
It didn’t make me feel any better.
Hearing myself bitch out loud made me feel really dumb.

This brings me back to a conversation I had a few days ago with my girlfriend Meg.
I had a dream board I made about where I wanted my life to be in early 2019.
I haven’t looked at that board since the day I made it and to my surprise I have every single thing I put on that board except one.
( We’ll get to that one thing later. )
The point I’d like to make here is that your life now was most likely your dream life just a few years ago and for some reason we expect there to be a parade when we get to the finish line.
Unfortunately there are no finish lines in life besides your death and you wont be there to celebrate that anyways.

Instead of sounding preachy now I’m going to talk from my own experience.
When I am not grateful for things in my life I cannot move forward.
This is because my negative attitude and feeling of lacking makes me work less.
These thoughts compound further thinking and of this is a head game that cannot be won other than through action.
The only time I have ever complained in my life about other people, circumstances or other bullshit has always been because I was not doing what I knew I needed to get done.

With that I am grateful to have such an amazing girlfriend to experience life with and to create photos together.
Meg is featured in the photos below and she’s always been my favorite subject and today I just had to remind myself how lucky I am to have a space and a partner to shoot with.

P.s. The only thing I don’t have from my 2019 dream board is a space where I can connect with nature.
I know it may sound silly but I’d really like to have a space I can call my own one day where I can just check out and make the work I want to make without the bustle of a city.

How to land your dream career.

It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m continuing on with a visual diary of my day-to-day.
Photographing every day was something I used to do religiously and since 2020 I really slowed down with this.
Needless to say, I’m really enjoying just taking snapshots throughout the day and it’s lead me to ponder while I’m out walking.
Last night a thought hit me after I saw an ad for a training video on how college kids could spruce up their resumes.
In my adult life, I have never gotten a job I have applied to.
Part of this I understand I did drop out of college and I understand that on paper this could look like a lack of commitment.
The other part that I don’t understand is that I was qualified for many of these jobs.
This is something that really used to bother me.
Now I am grateful as hell that I’ve never had to work for somebody else’s dreams but I didn’t always feel this way.
At one point I applied to over 150 jobs in a single year and I can’t tell you how many times my inbox came back with “Although your resume was impressive we regret to inform you blah blah blah”

I used to feel pretty worth this from these emails.
What was I doing wrong and what was wrong with me?
Did these people even take the time to look at my work rather than just skimming my resume?
Probably not and eventually I got a full-time job that I didn’t apply to.
I was shocked as hell but after speaking with the company they found my website through my linked-in page and they loved my work.
Finally, somebody had taken the time to read these blogs and see my actual photos not just skimmed my resume.

Fast forward a few months after working with them and I hated it.
Spending 16 hours a day shooting and editing and making half of what I was making while being self-employed was not enticing to me even if they were going to pay for my health insurance.
Again it felt like I was working to fulfill someone else’s dreams rather than my own.

This made me think about a lot of things, how does one get clients, how do you keep them, do I have a problem with having a boss, etc.

To answer all of those questions the first thing you need is good relationships with people.
Helping people will get you clients and so will making good work consistently.
Let the way you treat people and your work be your resume not a piece of paper.
Secondly, you keep a client by addressing their needs.
If they say that want more motion in their photos gives them more motion.
Nobody wants a grape soda when they asked for a grape Gatorade.

Do I have a problem with having a boss and the answer to that is no I have tons of bosses being a freelancer some are reasonable and others are a total pain in the ass.
The goal here is always to make an outline or scope of work beforehand so all of these bosses can know exactly what they will be getting from you.

Communication is everything when you are working as a freelancer.

To sum this up it isn’t easy to get a job when your emailing a piece of paper people can easily say no to.
What’s most important is to build relationships in person in the industry you want to be in and to help people out.
I’ve still never been hired at a job I’ve applied to but I’ve gotten hundreds of jobs through people I‘ve given to.

All thee best,
Atticus