"Control Your Own Destiny or Someone Else Will"

The great and amazing, Panda with Lil' P on the bed © 2013 Terrell Neasley

"Control your own destiny or someone else will."

~Jack Welch 

This last blog post made me recall a conversation I had recently with an individual whom, without going into specifics, lets just say I had to engage him. During the course of the discussion, this individual became appalled at a couple of strong declarations I made in which I described being adamant about life decisions which he determined to be unwise and unforgiving to say the least.

Art Model, Panda © 2013 Terrell Neasley

There are, for sure, some things I am simply adamant about, but I will not say absolute and resolute. One of these is that I have no intention of returning to a regular 9 to 5 job. I follow that statement up with this interjection, that in no way am I minimizing anybody's job, way of life, or economic choices. We all do what we have to do. My choices are for me because they suite me and are not intended to be a model for anyone else. Right now, that's not my path. I've been there and done it. I've made money for other people, given the priority of my time to other people, and sacrificed my own well-being for other people. My choices, my time, and my money are regulated by me at this point. When I have means, I do things. When I'm broke, I sit my ass down.

Art Model, Panda
© 2013 Terrell Neasley

Where I am not so resolute in this statement is when opportunities present themselves where my objectives can be realized via employment under an entity that pays extremely well and there is no significant sacrifice on my time and personal objectives. Case in point...I work 2 days at B&C Camera. I am employed by my friend and fellow photographer, Joe Dumic. I get a salary (not an extremely well one, I grant you), but I also get to work under a genius of a businessman. My time is not significantly sacrificed and when I need more time, I take it. As his friend, I am considerate about this. I don't just leave him high and dry with no notice. That's just rude.

The aforementioned individual at the beginning of this post could not understand my position or mentality to commit myself to my choices. I know what is important to me and that means more than selling a product or service that isn't aligned with my goals. Now its time to work for myself and my own objectives. If I fail, then its on me. I've played by the rules with the job thing and I simply can't leave my future in the hands of a company who's management operates for the benefit of the owner(s). I am simply a means for a function of profit that is not my own where cutting labor is often a first step towards minimizing costs when management screws up.

"A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing."

~George Bernard Shaw 

Art Model, Panda © 2013 Terrell Neasley

I feel confident in my faith, my upbringing, and myself. But when I do fail, I am also confident in the fact that I am resilient and resourceful enough to get up and try again. I have a history of tenacity and I think this is my time to give it a shot doing what I love. Photography is not only a means to that end, but also a reason for my passions. Your's might be fishing. I served with a guy who bought a Dodge truck and a bass fishing boat from winnings he was awarded over the course of a year. That was his passion and he built upon it. Guess what he did after the Army! The man became a pro bass fisherman. He told me it was the best job in the world, but really he meant it was the best job in the world FOR HIM.

Art Model, Panda © 2013 Terrell Neasley

Photography may not give me ALL the means for my objectives. I'm not sure I'll ever get my Tartan series yacht and circumnavigate the world sailing the South Pacific indefinitely on photography alone. I'm not even sure I can travel to the upcoming places I need to visit by way of photography. [Oh yeah, if you need a personal photog on YOUR travels and excursions, feel free to look me up. I am the bomb-diggidy.] If I can manage this, then that will simply be a dream come true. But whatever means I employ to achieve those goals, it won't take away from my photography. "Life is either a Great Adventure or Nothing". I chose the Great Adventure.

Its Just a HAT! Right...?

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

― Robert Frost

Me in my "Life Is Good" hat, Tobacco Caye, Belize

For about two weeks or so, I've been going nuts looking for my navy blue "Life Is Good" hat. Chances are, if you've seen me on the street, I'm wearing that hat and my government issued dog tags. I'm used to having my head covered from as long as I can remember and it drives me absolutely nuts when I lose a hat. I will wear out a hat or lose it before I move on. I've finally recovered it when I got invited over to my bud Chris' house to watch a UFC fight. Just as I stepped in the door, he handed me back my hat that I had inadvertently left there from a few weeks back when we were watching one of the NCAA Men's Basketball Final Four match-ups.

Getting it back made me stop for a second to contemplate the sense of relief I was feeling to an object of clothing. Yeah, everybody's got that favorite shirt, lucky tie, or sentimental article of attire, but I can't necessarily articulate why the hat had become so special. I can understand some of my previous head gear favorites. I had a Kangol my brother gave me once. I lost a Dallas Cowboy hat who used to be my favorite NFL team. I was pissed when my girlfriend's dog at my Murray State University hat while I was still in college.

I had no such history with this hat. It wasn't even my first Life Is Good brand hat. I had my first one for only a few days when it blew off my head in strong winds while I was trying to get a shot of a busted-up pier along the Gulf Coast. It blew off into the water. I had hoped it would float back to shore but instead it just skirted about 30 feet off the shore-line for a good 300 yards before I lost site of it. Had it not already been after dark and had I not been alone, I would have left my shoes and cell phone on the shore and gone after it. But I felt I would have been stupid to go into unfamiliar waters by myself in the dark. I still came back the next day and walked the shore line for a good mile before giving up.

"If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of." 

- Bruce Lee 

This hat held no such memories, but retained value nonetheless. The closest answer to my self-directed question may just be the brand: Life Is Good. Because it is. It can be crappy and downright seemingly unfair at times, but life is good. No matter how shitty it might be for you at the moment, you are alive and that means there's a chance of hope. There is no hopelessness as long as you draw breath. People have searched for the meaning of life since recorded history. Scientists today are searching tirelessly throughout the visible universe to find other evidence of life. Governments all over spend billions upon billions in an effort to hunt for planets like the Earth looking for possibilities of potential life.

Art Model, Panda © 2013 Terrell Neasley

They have found nothing of the sort. As far as we can see, light-years into our galaxy and beyond, we...right here on this tiny speck of dust, are the only life-forms in existence. There are 6 billion people on this planet. There are likely 60 billion more different forms of life for every person. Yet here we stand, bent on killing ourselves and our own planet via wars, crime, pollution, global warming, etc. I just don't understand why we have to be mean to one another despite having differences. As far as we know, we are all we have. Despite our multitudes here on Earth, we are a rarity in the universe. Life is not cheap. Life is Good.

On the Portraiture

"A portrait! What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound."

- Charles Baudelaire, 1859

Life...

This is the single most important element of photography that I absolutely have to photograph. Its the summation and hub of every element or aspect of photo that I endeavor to shoot. And if you drill down from there in order of importance for me, then next is the nude and then the portrait takes the tertiary role. Everything else that I do are either in supplement or complimentary to those three primary focuses for me. Life in general is what I endeavor to capture and in its purest form, the nude represents my favorite aspect of that, but the portraiture of my model is the deepest connection I have with the nude and is probably the most powerful aspect of anything I do.

Does that make any sense? I do some interior/architecture photography. Its still a representation of life, as in someone's expression of life as they see it for either a functional or aesthetic purpose. I photograph events and occasions which are moments of life taking place. I do still-life photography for my fine art work. This is evidence of life that it has existed and left its mark. I have photographed death which is the culmination of life or rather the conclusion of one aspect of it. I photograph life and death along with everything in between, as most every photographer does, I guess, to some degree. And like many, I do have my specialties. I will shoot almost anything and add my particular style of interpretation to it, but my primary focus in life is the nude and the portrait.

The interesting thing about the portrait is that it does not need to be nude. In some cases, the difference is not obvious and then sometimes it is. Whether a close up or the bust, the portrait still remains the most powerful aspect of photography, I believe. It is powerful because its limits are boundless. A good portraiture does not have to have pleasant features to be impactful. Exposure does not have to be correct, nor does even the focus. Sometimes, in the same way interesting ruins or abandoned buildings can be appealing, rough facial features can also draw the attention. However the portrait has one other distinguishing component that no other genre of photography captures and that's the connection that any human being can have with the subject by peering into the eyes. Even in some cases where the viewer cannot see the eyes of the subject, there can still be an implied connection between the mind of the viewer and that of the subject. You might wonder where the subject has come from, what they feel, or how they came to be. There is a voluntary transference that takes place which can draw in the viewer unlike no other depiction of any image.

"Who sees the human face correctly: the photographer, the mirror, or the painter?"

- Pablo Picasso

Mesmerizing, hypnotic, and even intoxicating can be terms ascribed to portraitures that are done well. This is why I love them above landscapes. I was looking through some of my images from my hiking expeditions over the last few years I've been in Las Vegas. I will go with people from the meetup groups I belong to or with close friends of mine. Ofttimes, I will go alone. However when I do go with people whom I may know or not, its funny how I'm one of the few photographers who will return from these trips with almost solely portraits and hardly any landscape. I was recently asked to licence a photo of Big Falls, a major natural landmark at Mt. Charleston, here in Nevada for a local publication. I've been up there several times, but had to look hard to find a good shot. Then when I found one, it wasn't anything that I had initially edited. Pretty much everything was of faces. Faces along the way. Faces with the falls. And faces along the return trip. Its the human condition that I shoot, although that may be a term quite overused. Most of my portraits are not posed, but rather candid shots in the moment where the subject may or may not know I'm taking the shot.

Heads. Faces. Some people are more interesting than others and for me, that starts often with the hair and then the eyes. Hair will often get my attention, but the eyes will draw me in and then I think to myself that I need that person's head. I tend to like faces that seem to tell a story or which may make me what to know about this person. Its interesting on the things that draw me to one person over another, because this is how I see the world. I am constantly looking at people. Its like a radar. I can pass through a crowd and there might be only a few faces that bleep in my range of scope. Some ping quite strongly with me. Others may ping less strongly, but my desire to photograph their portrait is no less as strong. What can I say? I like faces.

"Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter."

- Oscar Wilde