Client Update 2024
Without exception, all of my clients seem to be doing great right now, which makes me very happy. I’m grateful to be part of your growth and to assist you in reaching the next milestone each quarter and each year.
Your growth accelerates my growth in return, and as my client base continued to expand past critical mass last year, I started the process of finding someone to help me with editing and retouching.
After several trial runs with different individuals, I’ve finally contracted an editor who will be assisting me with upcoming projects. Kuba is someone I found far outside the local market, but is a brilliant editor who works in a similar style to me and also has incredibly high standards for his work. This is a huge step, as it finally expands my business from a one-man operation into a creative collaboration that will work much more efficiently for everyone.
I will still handle the final pass on every image, so the only difference you will see or feel within that process is an increase in the quality of both process and outcome: I will have more time to communicate with you on the front end and more brainspace to fine-tune your images on the back end.
As with all growth, there is an economic change coming as well. In addition to the above, this email is also a forecast of an increase in pricing, as well as changes in the booking process for architectural and commercial work, effective for all work booked after June 1st 2024. There is a document attached to this email that has all the new pricing laid out, as well as some notes on how scheduling, payment and revision process will work after June 1st.
Growing a business and improving my product doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The level of work that I would like to offer will require more moving parts in the coming year, but these changes are all for the business to service you better and more efficiently.
I take great pride in doing good work, but at the end of the day, images are an investment you make into your own business, to raise your revenue and grow your business. Every professional decision I make, such as hiring an editor to help, is to invest in your goals as much or more as my own.
As always, I am grateful to you for your continued support and friendship since the launch of the business in 2018, through the dark time when it was on life support in 2020, and into the prosperous present where we can all breathe a little easier and have fun in the process.
Please feel free to call or text me with any questions you have about the changes.
All the best (and only the best),
Steven
Peru: Bribery
This trip did matter. This trip does matter. But not in the ways I expected, and I can already tell it will be harder to put into words than any trip I’ve taken before. My eagerness to write my impressions is in open war with the need to be deliberate with my words.
My first written piece from Peru is on my website now.
I’m using this trip as a springboard to write again.
I made a mistake before I went on the trip, and that was that I decided the trip should matter, rather, I thought I knew how the ending would feel before I even left.
That was cute.
Now I’m unspooling the lessons I actually learned, and the first thing I wrote out of the morass ended up a piece of writing about writing.
It’s not that good, but I also hope it’s not that bad.
I want badly to write about this trip. At length.
Last night, after four days on the Inca Trail, my duffel and backpack hit the floor almost as soon as the door to my room swung open. They were chased by my clothes as I peeled off my several-days-worn pants and shirt in an unbroken stride to the shower.
The shower wasn’t the piping-hot amenity I had been promised in booking this hostel. The best that could be said was that the water coming from the shower head was slightly warmer than the surrounding air. But it was more than sufficient to scrub away the four unique odors steaming from different sectors of my carcass. Shortly after, the contents of my bags were scattered around the far side of my room as I dug for that last, sacred pair of clean underwear.
Four days isn’t a lot of time, but the human ability to pivot and scale the desired level of comfort to the outer edge of one’s attainable level of comfort, is fascinating.
On the trail, a bowl of warm water, dispensed from a tea kettle heated by an open flame, is the height of luxury at the end of a long day. I didn’t mind wearing the same clothes over again through rain and humidity… and any further discomforts were grinned off as part of the experience.
After four days of living as a drowned rat, sleeping in a tent in the Andes, I was back in Cusco. Simply re-entering a city was enough to make me aware of the phantom backpack throb in my back and shoulders, as well as the fungal pong coming from the wet socks sealed inside my waxed leather boots. I immediately wanted to be clean and dry. I wanted to order a hot sandwich and a cold beer in a climate-controlled building.
What a difference 24 hours and some walls make.
We are strange, silly animals.
After the aforementioned shower, I ended up ordering the dozy comfort of hot chocolate instead of the cold snap of a fresh beer… but I did have that sandwich.
I had a good sleep. I spent the next day–today–tying up some loose ends around the city, editing photos at my friends’ more-spacious AirBNB, and now I’m back here.
Cross-legged on a bed, in a formerly-tidy room.
Trying to make sense of the last week.
I want so badly to write about this trip. At length.
But it’s not going to be easy.
“Miniver Cheevy, born too late,” there is little anyone can offer in the travel writing space that hasn’t been done a hundred times.
I’ve gone on record saying that I create because I have no choice. Whether the final photos or words are good, bad, for the public or just for me, my sanity depends on my expelling enough ideas from my dome so that I can sleep at night. The fact that I get paid to take photos for a living is incidental: I would make images regardless.
That urge to write my thoughts is no less prevalent now. And I want very badly for them to have some kind of impact beyond “here’s what I did on winter vacation.”
To compound the problem: I wanted this trip to matter.
I waited sixteen years to make this trek. I built it up in my mind as a marriage of phsyical, mental and spiritual effort.
In that spirit, I made the mistake I caution others against: assuming the outcome. Anticipating a kind of ending.
This trip did matter. This trip does matter. But not in the ways I expected, and I can already tell it will be harder to put into words than any trip I’ve taken before. My eagerness to write my impressions is in open war with the need to be deliberate with my words.
There are just too many thoughts to unspool.
I visualize my mind as an unsettled ocean floor, and I must wait for the cloud of sediment to settle. The settling is not just through gravity, but also through the pre-existing current.
I’m still too close to the experience to see clearly.
“The slow blade penetrates the shield,” and I know that Patience is the only cure.
But the urge to write still frustrates my anxious mind, so I try to coax a few coherent thoughts out into the light.
Even if I’m not expressing them aloud, I’m never short on thoughts. On any given day, I can be lockjaw silent or a shit-talking motor-mouth. Either way, the thoughts are nonstop.
But my thoughts, because they come from me, are stubborn like me. Sometimes my ideas want to feel like their own idea, and they resist translation on command.
That’s when I bribe them. Usually with alcohol.
I like it, so they do too.
Tonight is no exception.
Ballantine’s Blended isn’t my first choice to draw some words out of the ethereal somewhere, but I’m not at home, and I work with whatever familiar label the small shop nearest my place in Cusco has in stock.
Lest the above be interpreted as a complaint, I never complain about a bottle acquired for roughly $10.
The first pour went down easy, then I felt it land.
Scotch hits harder at 10,000 feet.
And thank God for it; I’ll take all the help I can get.
I sip and I type and I sip and I type and I refill and I type and I find that sweet spot where the room is still steady, but the words on my laptop screen dance a little.
The impacted thoughts begin, ever so slightly, to shift.
The Little Things are All I Need
Staccato, tenor notes ripsaw through my REM sleep.
It’s dark. Disoriented.
My own bed?
Pillow is different, sheets are the wrong texture.
Hotel.
Oh yeah, I’m working.
This is my second of four work trips in two weeks. Geography, immaterial.
Roll over to silence phone alarm. It’s 5am on… I haven’t known what day it is for a while.
The calendar is also immaterial, for now, because sunrise is sunrise. If my phone is beeping this early, it’s because exteriors are on the schedule today.
It’s not officially summer yet, but the pre-dawn humidity is offensively ripe, so I’m not even going to think about showering just now.
Need coffee. Start the coffee.
Accidentally rip the coffee pod while tearing open the outer packaging. A fine mist of Colombian roast settles around my feet, and thus the first word I speak out loud today is irate and four letters.
Sorry, Mom.
I open another pod without civilian casualties. Flip the switch. Red light means brew. Achievement unlocked.
I thumb a few AAA batteries out of their charger and clumsily insert them into remote transceivers.
The alien din of my alarm is bad enough at this hour, so I prep gear under the desk lamp’s flaccid haze.
I notice the steam escaping through the seams in the cheap coffee maker. It shapes the light with fluid, feminine grace and I feel myself smile with appreciation.
It’s the little things.
The fog is clearing in my mind.
Only 5:10am, but I have to get outside quickly.
Because glass.
Wretched, interior-temperature glass.
It’s 80 degrees and 80% humidity outside.
The second I step outside, I can look forward to a fog bank of condensation between every glass element in the lens.
I could sleep another thirty minutes and still be outside to work in plenty of time, but I’ll need at least twenty minutes for my wide angle to get to temperature.
Final gear check. Fresh SD card. Fresh batteries. Fresh coffee. A resultant smile.
Again, the little things.
The little things add up to all I need.
[It’s probably more of a stupid grin, actually.]
I pocket a key card. I open the door. I swing my tripod through the doorframe and catch the door with my toe at the exact moment to silence its closing from a slam to a demure click. Muscle memory.
Not much of a party trick, but useful to not make pre-dawn enemies.
By the end of the day, I will have sweated through several shirts and showered at least twice to banish the symphony of untuned aromas that will attempt to cling to me as the day progresses. I’ll alternate between chugging water and coffee, and anything resembling “self-care” will be limited to a meal with a vegetable and some Zquill or CBD to make sure I sleep.
When the job is done, I’ll spend at least a week’s worth of work hours at my computer, turning stacks of raw images into vacation dreams that glow with their own light. These images will generate revenue that will make my fee look like couch money.
The early mornings and sweaty days will create images that sell joy and leisure to people looking for their next vacation spot.
I make no secret that I think marketing is a dirty business, and it’s a constant battle to engage with it without making moral and ethical compromises.
But I really do love this shit.
Water
Slate-green water chanted under a mournful sky. Each wave rolled in its turn and threw up a rebellious mist before churning back into the song, every rise and fall accompanied by another percussive hail.
Rain-washed breezes brushed the top of my head and moved my coat against my aching side. The distractions of a sunny day, and the noise of other people, were somewhere else, with someone else, leaving behind the elemental chorus of the planet. I allowed the movement of the water and the song of its pulse to absorb my mind and confuse my eyes.
In its mesmer, time disappeared. I had a glimpse of the chessboard, cleared.
The waters moved without worry. Rhythmic. Self-sufficient and without interference. The purity of formless form. That liquid place, from whence all life came, beckoned with a reminder of what life can still be.
For a moment, for a minute, for an hour, however long it was, chaos felt as alien to my place in the world as order felt the day before. I stopped trying to account for the previous night I drank away, or rationalize the tears I could still taste behind my teeth.
For the first time in a long time, I caught a glimpse of the peace I always seek, and in that moment it reminded me that chasing it was folly. Because, in a moment I did not expect it, it came to me. That tiny, transcendent moment was a gracious visit with a wordless benediction.
A shiver broke through the reverie and I pulled my coat closed against the gathering wind.
Even though I was terrified to trust the feeling, I realized I was starting to feel, even if was just a little, healed.
Restaurant Blog: Molly's Rise and Shine
Molly's Rise and Shine is finally open.
Yesterday afternoon, Molly’s announced their surprise soft opening on Facebook.
6am this morning, we were out the door for one of the most amazing breakfasts we’ve had in a long time.
Annie went with the breakfast plate while me and our buddy Terry opted for the Grand Slam McMuffin. I highly recommend getting freaky with the extra sausage patty for optimal ‘MERICA.
And, for the love of all things holy, get the collard greens.
Kudos to Mason Hereford and his team. They’ve made magic again.
