Pour Some Creativity Juice | Photo Fantastico Contest Experience | Arizona Documentary Family Photographer

Have you ever thought what you could achieve with 48 hours from start to finish? I remember that rush of adrenaline when I was a student working on my final paper and the deadline is fast approaching and I barely made it by a hair. Well, I normally wouldn’t recommend this approach to any student. However, after being stuck at home since January, I think some healthy dose of this kind of thrill is much needed by now. Conveniently, I stumbled upon this photography called Photo Fantastico three days before the contest started. I immediately signed up.

Unleash your most creative self in a contest unlike any other!

*Create 5 images in 2 days.

*Compete with photographers from across the globe

* Win prizes

*Be forced to create an incredibly creative photo collection!

Here came July 20th 10am, I hopped off my workout zoom call right into the clue(prompt) reveal party zoom call. Maybe it was the exercise or maybe it was that excitement for this unusual new contest I’m about to participate in, my heart was definitely beating fast. And we got our 5 clues:

1. Highs and Lows

2. Street Scene

3. AM/PM

4. Unexpected Visitor

5. How Fabulous!

Now I’ve got 48 hours to come up with 5 images that go along with these clues and are coherent within the set. Well, technically, 55 hours but with my kids nap schedules and buffering time for uploading my submission, I decided that I better have something ready within 48 hours. So it began!

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First I started to brainstorm under each clue and see what it means. Perhaps the fact that it’s the first clue, I spent a lot of time on the pair Highs and Lows. It can be literal. It can be figurative. I have recently done a challenge with flying a kite; I’m working on a home project to document our pretty unique life and living situation; I am constantly trying to just tell my story as a mother of three young kids. These were my first reaction and I started to try to expand along these lines hoping to find a good cohesive line of story for the rest of the prompts. However, I couldn’t make sense out of these separate tidbits. I thought to myself, it would definitely be easier if I could first write a story and then break up the scenes into five segments.

A couple of hours had passed and I need to start to make some lunch for the kids. First change of course. I’ve never felt more inadequate in storytelling than this moment. I wish I had finished the Masterclass on creative writing and storytelling. Do I have time to go and finish the second half of that class now? Probably not. Precious time!! While lunch was in the making, my brain was definitely not in the kitchen. Surprisingly I did not burn any food. Haha. During nap time, I started to google “how to write a short story“ and “how to write micro stories“. Honestly, the more I read other people’s short stories, the more inadequate I felt in story writing. I started to listen to songs and musics hoping to find inspirations. I texted the clues to my mother-in-law and told her to come up with a poem or a short story with it and hoped that I could possibly use her creation as inspiration or at least for my other personal project. I also gave the five clues to my daughter and asked her to draw stories for the different clues.

I realized that she used each prompt to create an individual story but as a whole, these stories were cohesively her. Funny, imaginary and full of love. I recorded my daughter telling me all these stories actually. I gave it a thought that maybe, I could also have a series of stories that are not related but all with the same theme? Quickly I gave up on that idea because it was too much work for too little time. Maybe it will be a fun project on my own for the future to create a series of stories based on my daughters’ drawings. But I did come up with another idea—are there any kids’ short stories or micro stories? Then I stumbled upon this pot of gold:

The Lost Balloon

by Evaleen Stein

O dear! my purple toy balloon

Has flown away! and very soon

It will be high up as the moon!

And don't you think the man up there

Will wonder what it is, and stare?

Perhaps hell say, "Well, I declare!"

Or, maybe if it chance there are

Some little boys in yonder star,

And if it floats away so far,

Perhaps they'll jump up very high

And catch the cord as it goes by!

At any rate I hope they'll try!

This is a poem called The Lost Balloon by Evaleen Stein, a not so famous American female poet, included in the book Child Songs of Cheer published in August 1918. Well, with it being almost August and us being in a pandemic, I immediately felt drawn to the fact that there is this book called Child Songs of Cheer published back then. I looked up the book but there isn’t much information on the background information on either the book or the poet. I also found it rather interesting that the ratings on Evaleen’s works are not that great, according to goodreads at least. Nonetheless, after a century, I found this poem and was inspired by it. My kids enjoyed this poem along with her other works in the collection. On a side note, my husband and I have been talking about how everything is entertaining these days including books. We have been wondering what books from a hundred years ago looked like and how kids were reading/listening to stories back then without the constant screen time stimulation. Anyways, this one little poem just spoke to me on so many levels.

I decided to tell a story that’s adapted from this old poem with a spin of my kids current favorite made-up story of Bob the Alien. So I sketched up my plots and ordered my balloons.

My ideas: 1. Highs and Lows—balloons are flying highs and lows and that’s how much my kids love their toy balloons. 2. Street Scene—My girl lost her balloon so she’s chasing her balloon in the street. 3. AM/PM—the balloon got caught in a big tree and my girl will go look at it in the morning and at night.(Cue—my attempt to do an awesome astrophotography shot for the PM with balloon still stuck in the tree.) 4. Unexpected Visitor—Of course the comet! 5. How Fabulous—Bob the Alien turned the balloon into a star and brought it back! I had two evening gold hours, two mornings, and two nights to get all these shots in.

We have been having unusual cloudy days this week somehow and of course on the days of this contest, we didn’t have my favorite golden hour sunsets pretty much at all. My kids were already in bed but I peeked through the window and saw that slice of golden light shining, I grabbed my girl out of bed and did a few shots. She was not that thrilled because she was just about to get to this exciting part in the story Dad was reading. I was not feeling too happy about the images because we were losing light fast. So I called it good and send my girl back to bed and decided to give it a try to hopefully get a shot of the comet somehow through the clouds.

I climbed up to our roof for the first time. I had my phone out trying to locate the stars behind the clouds. Then I laid down and just stared at the sky for a long while, by myself. It was quiet. I still had all these thoughts rambling through my head but it was a nice quiet time without interruption from anyone or any devices. Eventually I just gave up because there were just too many clouds and I couldn’t see any stars. I probably should have just taken the long drive out of the city but oh well. I had a headache anyways so let’s just get some rest and we will have a busy day ahead of us.

I woke up late because of the headache I had the night before so as soon as I woke up, I jumped right in to shooting.

These were pretty good images to show that the kids were having fun with their balloons and they took the balloons everywhere they went. They were pretending that it were their birthday. However, it was not as good as I wanted the image to be. So I kept shooting. Gotta work hard and it’s totally ok to have a lot of not so good photos to get THE shot.

I was hungry. I was hot. Can you even imagine how much the kids were whining at this point? Yeah, we better get the kids some breakfast. I asked my husband to take a behind the scene photo of me taking photos and when I saw that photo, I had a new idea. (Btw, Creative editing and Photoshop are allowed in the contest but you just have to use the materials created within the contest time frame.)

Kids were fed so I got them out of the house again. To give them a break I just let them play in the backyard while I climbed onto the roof again. Man, it was not a good idea to climb up to the roof in Arizona in the middle of the day without wearing gloves or thick pants or good shoes or sunscreen. I was just burning. But again, it is just an amazing view from up high to watch my little kids running around. Yeah, now I started to regret that I did not get the drone I wanted. Oh well, climbing up to the roof is not that bad after all because I found a new angle.

Then I thought, hey, how about shooting from this angle with my girl looking at the balloon stuck in a big tree. I tied up a balloon in the tree and then asked(more like yelled at) my girl to go over to the tree and look at the balloon up there and I’ll just take one last photo and they can go back into the air-conditioned house instead of being baked in the scorching Arizona sunlight.

My girl was rather upset that she had to do one more photo so she did not want to look up to the balloon and literally just walked away back inside right after I got this shot.

But I knew that I just got THE shot.

Now, good thing is that I got the shot. Bad news—I knew that this would be the shot for the prompt of Highs and Lows as the opening of a story. With an opening strong, I felt that I had to keep the story more interesting to have a good climax. The balloon is already in the tree so how do I get a street scene? It doesn’t make sense to chase a balloon anymore. Maybe someone peeking from the street and saw my kids trying to get the balloon but couldn’t reach it?

I tried my Gopro but it was too wide. It was a nice looking view with my long lens…Well I would need to set up my camera in the street and use a remote to trigger it and duck down behind the fence to send my kids up a ladder trying to get the balloon. But then what about my AM/PM?! Nah. Not gonna work.

With lunch time fast approaching and me still running around our house covered by sweat, kids happily got promised with happy meals for lunch. Thank you nice sister from our church for sending my kids their birthday McDonald giftcards. Then I thought, hey, it would be cool to create a scene where my kids saw the balloon store and wanted a balloon but wish not granted! So we drove to the party city store and parked at different spots in front of the store with double blinker on and I took some photos. The we rushed back home. Well, I did take one more stop to get my kids each a frappuccino as a little reward on top of their happy meals. There is no shame to bribe my kids for photos. Haha.

In order to make sure that my story is actually smooth and I would not exceed the word count limit for the write up, I spent some time to actually write down my story that I was trying to tell:

“Hold the string, otherwise...” Lolo’s loud grunt cut off mom’s sentence. Lolo barely stepped into the backyard. Immediately her head dropped. Frozen for a few seconds, she then said,”It’s too hot. I’m going back inside.” After picking up lunch, Lolo rapidly tapped her right hand on the window.“There Mom! Only two dollars! Please!” Mom actually flipped the turn signal! She changed to the left lane and turned up the radio. “Can a red round balloon still turn into a star?” Lolo asked. Finishing up Lolo’s favorite impromptu bedtime story of Bob the Alien, Dad said, “perhaps Bob would catch the balloon when it passes by and check for you.” The next morning at only 5:30am, Mom woke up to Lolo’s loud squeal:”Look Bob came!” In the backyard mom saw Lolo dancing, with a gold star balloon. How fabulous!

I got the closing shots and sent the kids to bed. Now the last shot would be the comet shot to represent Bob the Alien’s unexpected visit. I climbed up onto the roof again. Now, we are still having cloudy days but we had a little clearer sky throughout the day so I thought that I could at least get something—maybe just some stars if not the comet. I mean, our neighborhood is actually relatively dark at night and we could have seen a lot of stars on a summer night. However, the luck was not on my side.

Now my awesome astrophotography shots were not happening for sure.What do I do? I thought. While lying on our hot roof, I thought that I could choose to indicate that an unexpected visitor, like a friend, came to deliver some goodies at the door including a new balloon. But that was just too cheesy of a story and just in a lack of some childish magic. It was getting late. I had to go to bed and get some sleep before my baby gets up in the middle of the night. Then I thought, what if I create a comet in my photo somehow? I tried to create a comet with flying by airplanes. Then it hit me…What if I just use my phone flashlight to do light paint somehow? So there I was, late at night standing on top of my roof alone trying to create a comet illusion with my phone flashing at different angles. Soon enough, there was a helicopter circling around the neighborhood with a beam down. It didn’t catch me in the spot light though, so maybe it was just searching for a criminal I thought.

I’ve got the raw images and I still have to edit them. I wanted to reflect that nostalgia feeling in my series since I was originally inspired by a poem from 1918. Also I wanted to make it less technical—meaning less showing how good a photographer I am as in parallel to the fact that Evaleen was not that famous or good of a poet back then but still the work made an impact because of the content rather than the technics. I had my series done for proofing at 2am, 15 hours before deadline. In the morning, I printed the 5 images out and pinned them to the wall to actually look at them in the old fashion way. Then I made some adjustments on the tones in some of the images and was happy about my collection. I submitted the collection a few hours before the deadline.

I told my husband the night after I submitted my entry:

Man that was hard. But it was really fun!

Looking at submissions from previous years, I was not expecting to win anything. This whole contest was mostly to push myself a little further on my creative journey. At the same time, it was just a good clean fun thing to do for myself when I have been stuck with kids 24/7 for six months now.

The judging and award ceremony was live on a zoom call the next day. That’s the thrill! Since I was not expecting to win, I was muted without video showing. I was putting my baby to take a nap when I was watching the submission collection slideshow. There were some real AH-mazing sets! By the end of the slideshow, I was ready to give my applauses to the winners and try harder next time. HOWEVER, guess what, they announced the first Best-of-Prompt winner for Highs and Lows and there I saw my name. WHAT?! I definitely did not expect that. I had to scramble to put my baby down in bed, unmute myself and turn on the video when they were trying to find out if I were there. That was actually really cool and unexpected that I actually won. It was really nice to hear what the judges had to say about what they liked my image and I thought that I successfully conveyed my message there. It was also VERY cool to be able to have my image in front of so many photographers I look up to. Honestly, I didn’t even remember what they said the prizes were since I was not expecting to win. The whole experience itself was worth the participation already and now that one of my images actually won, it was even better.

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This is a super long post. I know I know! So if you have made it all the way through, wow, thank you!!!!

I really wanted to share my WHOLE experience as I went through this fun yet challenging creative process.

There are some very valuable things I took away from this process:

• We are our own worst critiques so don’t be too hard on ourselves, especially as creatives. Or in life in general. We are probably better than we thought. Also, while we cannot please everyone out there, our work speaks to people in ways we might not even expect. Just like Evaleen Stein wasn’t that famous back in his days and she didn’t get extremely good ratings nowadays, her work still impacted me in a positive way. Hopefully I can just keep sharing my work and my thoughts, then one day my images or words might make an impact on someone’s life. That is good enough.

• Creativity comes from outside but also more importantly from within. One thing I did NOT do during this process was to look at other people’s photos for inspiration. I wanted my photos to be totally mine. You can get inspirations from a lot of different places rather than someone else’ existing images and try to replicate. I read a quote once: “Inspirations are for amateurs and for the rest of us, we just get to work.“ Don’t get me wrong, it is VERY important to study other amazing photographers’ work. However, it’s more important to actually just get to work. If I didn’t climb up onto the roof again during the day just trying to experiment from different angles, I would not have gotten the shot that won the award. Sometimes it is pure luck but I also do believe that hard work warrants better luck in the long run.

• Find a good community. It was just amazing to see how supportive everyone was during this whole process. All the submissions are amazing one way or another. Some are stellar in technical aspects. Some are pure awesome stories. Some provoke strong emotions. Some bring smiles to my face. To me, we are all winners. And it is TRULY a good feeling to be able to recognize each other’s strength and be happy for one another. Yes, this is a competition, literally. However, I felt more strongly about community over competition through the process. If you feel like you don’t belong to any of the existing communities, then create your own. People likeminded will find your existence valuable.

• If you think life is boring or you are stuck, just say yes to something crazy and give it a try. Or go find a personal project and work on it. Just go and do something about it, something. Don’t wait for a better opportunity. I actually signed up for a visual storytelling workshop that will start soon so if I had waited, technically speaking I would have been better prepared to win. I’m glad that I didn’t wait till the next round to start. These past few days have been one of the absolutely highlights of the year. Especially now that we are facing all the craziness in this world, this little project was a nice escape from my other problems even for just a little bit. I was refueled.

• There is always room for improvement. It’s kinda funny that the more awards I’ve won, the more I feel that I’ve got long ways to go. It’s just super humbling when you compare your work against other brilliant works. I am getting better and better at critiques on my own work. I know this might sound contradictory from my first point, but I think it is a good thing to know how to critique my own work setting emotions and attachments aside, from a pure professional way. Even with my award winning image, I already feel that I could make it even stronger with some tweaks. It’s just exciting, to me at least, to know that I still could get so much better in the future.

• A lot work goes into amazing results. The longer I’ve been taking photos, the more I know that it takes a whoooooooole lot of work to become a great photographer. There is no shortcut. There is no overnight fame and fortune like winning a lottery. If I am not where I want to be, I simply have to put in more hard work to get there. Guess what, along the way I will fail. Many many times. I will fail miserably at some point, then again and again. But it is OK. It’s all part of the journey and part of the learning. Then I am better than ever before.

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Well, that’s what I have been doing these past couple of days. Thank you for listening to my ramblings and my thoughts.

If you are into photography and you want to get some creativity juice flowing, you definitely NEED to check out the Photo Fantastico Contest for their next run in November. Maybe we will compete together!

Let's Fly A Kite | Arizona Documentary Photographer

I’m doing this summer photo challenge and the prompt of the week is Flying A Kite. Well, first off, I’ve never been good at flying kites ever. Two, we don’t get much breeze here in Arizona—we either get nothing or haboob dust storms. With that being said though, what challenge would it be without it being challenging right? So let’s fly a kite!

But we don’t have a kite. So…let’s make a kite first. How hard can it be to make a kite, right?

Well, the steps are simple and clear but when kids are involved in the making, things don’t usually go as planned. And, yes, I’m blaming the kids. Ok ok, the actual fact is that, I might be crafty but I definitely don’t know how to make a kite. I helped the kids to tie their frames together and I immediately realized that the cross is not symmetric. Oh well.

Of course, my boy wanted to get his hands on the project too. He picked up his scissors and went directly for the thread that’s forming the frame. I was so close to screaming NOOOOOO! Somehow I calmed myself down and asked him what he thinks he needs to do to fix it. He actually came up with the idea that we could just tape it back. We tried it out and it worked ok. I mean, probably still affected how a kite can fly but at least we don’t have a broken kite for the moment. Lesson learned, just roll with it because the kite might never fly anyways.

My girl’s favorite part was probably making the tail for the kite. She mede the bows and tied them onto the string. While I was attaching the tail to the kite, she realized that she could blow on the bows and they would spin. How fun! Until…

The string got all tangled up. My girl said that we could just cut it off and then make a new tail. I was trying to teach her a lesson about being patient and trying to fix things before getting a new one. I spent the entire nap time trying to untangle these 8 bows and I gave up at the end. I was like, forget that. Why did I spend so much time on a kite that probably would never even fly?! I told the kids, hey, look, our kites probably would never fly but we are gonna still give them a try. Also, if somehow our kite did get up into the air, the string might break and the kite might fly away. We can always make new kites right?

Look at me, I am doing such a great job lowering the expectation for my kids so they wouldn’t throw a tantrum later when we actually try to fly a kite.

Surprise surprise, our kites, never got to fly! Ha! We tried and tried. Most likely it was because the frame was too heavy and it was not symmetric enough. However, the kids still had fun running around holding the kites and just watch the tangled tails fly in the air. And eventually it turned into a chasing game and see who can escape from daddy.

The attempt to fly a kite definitely failed but my kids still had a lot of fun. My girl told me that we could try again next time when there is a dust storm so we get stronger winds. She also told grandma later that the kite we made together was her favorite kite. Thanks kiddos.

Even though the kite spent most of the time surfing on our lawn dragged by my kids, it has been quite a fun experience. At least now I know I am not that good at making kites and we can joke about it. And regardless, my kids love me for spending the time working with them to attempt to make and fly a kite. That’s what matters the most, isn’t it?

A Celebration in Pandemic | Arizona Documentary Family Photographer

Covid-19 has been around for a couple of months now in the US and July 4th is now here. Independence Day celebrations had always been a fun part for me and for the kids. We usually had family and friends over at our place for a party and then we will have fireworks at the end of the day. This year, with the pandemic things are definitely different. So what do we do? We don’t want to just cancel everything in life but we also cannot risk having a little too much fun for the short moment and then causing long-term damages to our healths and family relationship. It’s never an easy decision when dealing with unprecedented situations.

We decided to skip the family dinner together since most of people in our extended family do not feel comfortable dining together and mingle in a closed space and it is still too hot to have everyone eat in the backyard. We would get together for fireworks later at night while social distancing.

This is what it looks like having a firework show during a pandemic.

We set up the chairs for each small family with great social distancing in between. Everyone is wearing a mask to protect the high risk parents. And we lit up the fireworks and watched from a far.

I was trying to figure out how I feel about this whole celebration in pandemic thing. Honestly, it was a pretty unsettling eerie feeling. We were together but we couldn’t even see what the people from across the lawn are doing. Our kids and their cousin are definitely excited to see fireworks, but they couldn’t really share the joy from so far apart especially when they are also wearing protective headphones.

At one point, some neighbors set off these huge fireworks. Then everyone was just watching the big firework while ignoring our little firework.

It happened to be full moon too. In Chinese culture whenever we see a full moon we think about reunion of the family. In a sense, we were indeed together as a family, but honestly, I felt the most apart and disconnected than ever. Maybe it’s just me. I need to have either physical connection or a good quality time to fill my cup. I wonder if this is the best way to stay connected. I wonder what we could do to make sure that we can meet the needs for human connections and a sense of union.

At least I know that my kids had fun and that would be enough for now. For the long run though, we gotta figure something out so a celebration can feel a little bit more like an actual celebration.

I'm a FINALIST--2019 Shoot & Share Photo Contest Results | Arizona Family Photographer

I’m proud to say that I made it to be a finalist in the largest global annual photo contest!

At the beginning of each year, there is this GIANT global photo contest happening—The Shoot & Share Photo Contest. It is probably the world’s largest contest. It’s free. It’s super fair. It’s amazingly fun. We had 583,150 photos in total submitted by photographers from all around the world. Yes, you read it right. We had almost 600K photos.

And guess what? I actually made it to be a FINALIST! Yay!

Ok. Let’s recap just in case you are not familiar with how this contest works and why this is actually kinda a big deal for me.

In the contest, each photographer are allowed to submit 50 unique images total into 25 different categories. Then all the images will be put into random set of 4s in each category to be voted on. When a voter gets on the voting page, the screen will show a random set from a random category and the voter will click on his/her favorite and then a new random set will show up automatically. Once all images have been seen enough times(probably hundreds and hundreds of times at least), one round ends and they will make a cut at the bottom and the top images go into the next round. After 12 rounds of voting, we will have the winners and we will be able to see each of our images’ placement in that category.

Being an engineering major, I’d just like to play with the numbers for a sec here. Each of us can submit up to 50 photos and we have a total of close to 600k photos, the possibility of finding one of my own image is…pretty much close to zero. Of course, the algorithm is a lot more complicated than just a possibility calculation here. This is why this contest is actually really fair. It’s a pure popularity contest but there is no way anyone could affect the results just because he or she knows a few more people in the circle. You get the idea.

This is the second year for me to be in the contest. I do it mostly to hold myself accountable—having an annual competition helps me to push myself harder to create contest quality images throughout the year. Also this is an amazing learning opportunity. I mean, seriously, where else can you see so many photos from all over the world all at one place?! With that being said, while I know I still have long ways to go to be where I really want to be in the industry, I compare with how I did last year more in this contest than with how other people did.

Without further ado, here are my results!

As you can see, this year I have 27 images out of my 50 submissions ended up in the top 30% while I only had 5 images in the top 30% last year. This is a huge jump for me and I’m really happy about the improvements I’ve made within this one year.

I also have one image that made it to the finalist round, top 500, and placed 336th in the Family Photo Category(with a total of 41,257 submissions). I’ll have to say, it feels GUUUUUD to be among the top 500 family photos in the world. And as a family photographer, I am super excited that one of my clients’ family photo placed the best.

At the same time, I also entered a few images of documentation of my own family life into the lifestyle/documentary category and I’m soooo glad that many of them placed well too. While I LOOOOVE all my clients’ families, I just can’t love any family more than my own. It is just special to me to see that people really like to see the real life stuff too.

While I might have spent way too much time voting, I’m definitely beyond excited to see the results. Of course, I’ll have to say THANK YOU to all the families who have trusted my vision and let me create magic in the past year. You probably have no idea how much it means to me to have a family fully trust me with their family photo sessions—starting from the location choice, to personalized styling, and all the way to the fun intimate session experience. What even means more to me is that in this industry where weddings are the obvious special occasion to be remembered, so many people have put their effort, emotions and investments into preserving family memories as well.

It has been a good year and here is to an even better year of 2019! Let’s make some magic!

Enjoy the little slideshow I put together <3

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Little Traveling Dress | Mesa Arizona Family Photographer

A couple of months ago, I was trying to come up with some fun projects for myself. I saw that there are many people who are doing traveling dress projects—essentially, sisterhood of the traveling pants but dresses and for photographers. Then I thought, how about doing a traveling dress but for little sisters?! I bounced the idea of a Little Traveling Dress Project to a few friends of mine and many of them jumped on board quickly! How exciting!

On August 27th 2018, I ordered a dress and our Little Traveling Dress Project began.

One little dress, two countries, six states/provinces, eight photographers.

We all had the same dress for a week to create. We will not reveal the work we have created until everyone had a chance to finish their journey. This is where magic happens. And the whole project was finished just before Christmas.

For the past few months, we have all been anxiously waiting to see what the other people had created and today is the day! It’s our reveal party today! Please follow along and find out how creativity works magic with each individual in an amazingly different way.

I’m so excited to share my part of the journey and you will be able to link to the other 7 photographers’ work as well!

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Originally, when I started the project, knowing that I would be the last person to play with the dress, I was planning a BIG EPIC vision in my mind. I was going to have my girl wear the dress. I was going to make her all gorgeous. I was going to take her to all these epic places around the valley in Arizona.

HOWEVER, when time went by, my vision changed.

I had been digging into my soul a little bit about why I am doing all these photos. I realized that ever since I have started my business, I have felt more insecure and more inadequate than ever. I look at other people’s photos and think—I want a house like that with a big window and pure white walls so I can take better photos with better widow lights; I want to go to those epic places because dang those locations are so cool; I want to have darker dinning table so it looks better as a background when I take photos of my kids make cookies…The list goes on and on. I realized that, I ALWAYS have a vision and what I am trying to do is to create something out of my norm to fit into my vision. So instead of trying to make epic lifestyle like our normal way of living a life, I want to find the beauty in our seemingly normal life.

SO, instead of taking road trips in this pretty dress and makeups and flower crowns, we just lived a good normal life, but wearing a pretty dress.

It’s close to Christmas. My family doesn’t really have Christmas traditions as we never grow up celebrating it. But it would be nice to help my kids to get into the holiday feels. So we went to a Christmas Tree Lot. The owners there were super nice and let my kids run through the trees. They even pointed out that they have colored trees in the back.

My kids were beyond excited to just run free there.

I’ll have to say, I’ve never seen a happier face in a tree lot.

Our Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, set up a Giving Machine in downtown Gilbert this year to make it easy for people to give in the holiday seasons. It gives you such a good warm feeling when you know that you can give because you have been given much. For my kids who are still very young, it can be challenging to find service opportunities for them so we took advantage of the giving machine and stopped by after we ran in the tree lot for a good while.

We explained to the kids that we get to give something to people and children who are in need and they get to choose what they want to give. Both of my kids took it pretty seriously and looked at the menu/list of possible items for donation for quite a while. My boy, who loves balls more than anything, decided to donate soccer balls. My girl actually decided to donate some building-block toys and also funds for after school program so other little friends can go to school like her and play with blocks too! They were literally shouting with joy when they see the items they chose was donated through the giving machine.

There is no place better than home.

I mean, seriously. This should be the case. If you are like me before drooling over other people’s home, you got change. Not saying that we should use it as an excuse to never clean dishes or vacuum your carpet just because you love your home no matter what. But seriously, this is our life now and we should love it no matter what.

Dance in the street in front of the house even on a super overcast and cold day. Walking through irrigation rivers at home and pick up flowers and dirt. Who cares if people driving by think that we are crazy. We are home and we are happy.

One of the awesome perks about living in Arizona is that we get super amazing citrus in the winter time.

And, lucky us, we LOVE citrus.

When we found out that a few of our own citrus trees have gotten sick and we are not going to have many good fruits this year of our own, we were really sad. Good news is that we have a great citrus orchard close by and every year they host citrus picking events. Just before all the oranges and grapefruits got picked this year, we went in the orchard to enjoy the view of an approaching harvest.

Of course, when there is food to look at but not allowed to pick any, all her energy goes into a goofy ball and shows up in every single photo I attempt to take.

It is Christmas season after all. With little ones at home, we tend to decorate the house a little later so all the ornaments can stay on the tree for a little bit and all the lights can stay on for a while. It took about 5 days for our tree to become bare on the bottom 2/3 and our lights on the tree to totally go out. But while it lasted, we had fun having a festive house.

When there is a little “devil” tearing everything down at home, you gotta balance it out with a little angel.

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So yeah, these are what I’ve done with the Little Traveling Dress. These are no where near what I had envisioned at first. They are not epic. They are not that artistic. They are not the ones that stir up the darkest dust in your soul and make you think.

HOWEVER, each one of these photos

MADE ME SMILE.

Yes, for that week, I was almost constantly taking photos for my girl. I was always thinking what fun stuff we could do. I gave my kids so much more attention than before. I was not on social media. I was not comparing myself with other moms. I was not comparing how my kids are with other kids.

While these photos might not mean anything to other people, they mean the world to me. These reminded me of the pure joy of being a child. These reminded me of the pure joy of being a mom. These reminded me of the joy of simply being alive and enjoying life to the fullest.

My girl’s name means Life. She is full of life. Her simple brightness is epic enough to light the world—at least my world.

Like I said, even the eight of us who had the chance to create using the same object, had different perspectives and angles. My journey with this little dress helped me to confirm my why—Life is crazy, but life is good. And I’m loving it.

I surely hope all of you can feel the joy of this little girl and be inspired to find and focus on the simple, small, seemingly insignificant joyful moments in your life AND document them! When life gets hard, which is almost every other minute especially if you have a few little munchkins in your house, look back at those small moments that bring smiles onto your face.

Hope you all had a wonderful 2018 and wish you a happy new year in 2019!

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To follow along our reveal party with our Instagram Loop starting here: @amydangerfieldphotography

To check some of the other 7 photographers’ work on their blogs starting here:

Sabrina: https://forever22photography.com/2018/12/30/the-little-traveling-dress-project

Tracy: https://www.tracydawnphotography.com/blog/

Susan: https://www.susan-rice-photography.com/blog/2018/12/29/the-little-traveling-dress

Erica: https://woodsywondersphotography.com/uncategorized/a-little-traveling-dress-project/

Breastfeeding Awareness Week Motherhood Session | Mesa Lifestyle Family Photographer

I found out a while ago that World Breastfeeding Week is celebrated August 1-7 each year encourage breastfeeding and improve the health of babies around the world. 

I was visiting with some of my family members the other day. My son came to me being cranky so I picked him up and nursed him while keep chatting. My mother-in-law who was sitting across the living room looked a little surprised. I nodded and said--yeah, I'm still nursing him. Then us three moms had a great conversation about our breastfeeding journeys. 

"Breastfeeding--Foundation of Life"

We hear about breastfeeding a lot. We hear that it's great for babies. We hear that it's amazing how female body works. We hear that we should encourage breastfeeding. But there's actually so much more we don't talk about. Breastfeeding means differently for each mom but ultimately, breastfeeding becomes part of the story of motherhood. The good, the bad, the pretty, the ugly. All honest and raw.

I'm Amy. I'm a breastfeeding Mom. 

When I was pregnant with my girl, we were living in China, where every mom seems to be feeding babies formula because mom needs to go back to work after the maternity leave. I remember all too well standing in front of shelves of formula in the store, feeling extremely anxious--the formula is expensive; the bottles are expensive; I don't know what kind would be the best. With my girl having a birth defect, after being scared by the recommendation of termination of the pregnancy, we were also preparing to need to save millions of dollars for her medical expenses. All these preparation for motherhood is just stressful. Luckily, I have my husband. He firmly told me--you will do fine. You will breastfeed. We will be just fine! We won't need to buy formula or bottles. Our girl will be alright. So I was determined that I'm not going to buy bottles. I'm going to breastfeed. 

Due to my girl's birth defect, she was taken to NICU right away. The nurse was really nice to let me kiss my girl before she was wrapped up and sent to a different floor. In China, parents are not allowed to be in the NICU. Technically speaking, you can go talk to the nurse about your child's situation every afternoon at 3pm. So I took a nap and started to try and pump some milk preparing for breastfeeding when my girl could come back. It's the weirdest feeling--I just had a baby but my baby was not with me but I was pumping milk. 

After 10 hours, my husband being an American, said "this is ridiculous. I am going to go get her back!" So there he went. A tall Mandarin-speaking white guy went alone to NICU and got our baby girl back magically. My baby girl was picked up by her daddy and put in my arm. She wanted to nurse right away. My baby girl nursed for the first time 10 hours after she was born. That was the longest 10 hours in my life. Holding her in my arms and feeling her little mouth connected to me made me realize that she is alive, perfectly alive. I didn't lose her. I'm sustaining her life. And I'm now a mom. 

So here began my breastfeeding journey. 

You would probably think that with such a strong motivation and connection, breastfeeding would be a piece of cake for me. Oh no. Oh no. 

With stitches, it took me at least a month before I could sit comfortably let alone holding a baby. But if I lie down and nurse, I couldn't see how she latched and I wasn't able to get a good feeding. Because she was not latched very well, she was sucking extremely hard and I was bleeding like crazy on my nipples. For the first month and half, I was feeling pain after pain after pain all over the places but I was on a new-mom high so I carried through. My mom helped us for the first 2 weeks and my husband was working at home so it was really helpful that I was able to feed the baby and then run to the farmers market without worrying about my baby and come back just in time to feed her again. 

Then, sleep deprivation kicked in. I was all a sudden SO TIRED. I was the only one who can feed the baby and my baby just wanted to be eating constantly. Of course, I didn't know that for the first while, babies grow so much and they eat so much. I just felt like I lost myself. I fed the baby, grocery shopped, fed the baby again, cooked, fed the baby again, cleaned, fed the baby again, cooked again, fed the baby again...I felt like a machine. I hated it. I just wanted my baby to sleep! And each time I was awake in the middle of the night, I wanted to wake up my husband just so he could feel how tired I was. Eventually, we worked out a good system where my husband would wear the baby wrap and wrap our girl on him and let me take a two hour nap. That saved me. Also I talked to other nursing moms and found out that we were all the same. I was not the only one who was sleep deprived. I was not the only one who's kid is nursing constantly. I was not the only one who struggles. 

Breastfeeding is amazing. Breastfeeding is sustaining my baby's life. Breastfeeding was the gentle reminder for me everyday that my baby girl is alive. However, it was hard. It can be stressful. I needed a lot of support to be able to do it! It was not a piece of cake. 

I nursed my girl till I was pregnant with my boy. My milk dried up. One day, I stopped offering. She didn't ask for it. That was the end of my first time breastfeeding. 

I've done it once. It should be easy for the second time, right?

My boy came along. I had milk come in right away. I knew how he's supposed to latch this time. I know that I need to drink plenty of water. I know that I will be sleep deprived. I'm prepared. 

Until I realize that one thing I really miss about having only one child is that I could sleep when she slept. Now, I'm still sleep deprived from my second breastfeeding baby but my oldest is almost constantly needing my attention. I can't leave her alone in the house without watching her. I can't keep up with the energy either. And sometimes what seems worse this time around is that my girl would get jealous that her baby brother gets mama all the time and she would throw a fit or she would interrupt. It's no longer a peaceful bonding time for me to nurse my baby boy. 

Also this time, I found out later that when my boy is teething, he likes to use me as his teething toy. Ouch. Or he would be distracted by his sister in the other room and try to watch while still latching. Looking at my boy's chub chub, I shouldn't worry about how much he has eaten but when he doesn't nurse well because of all the distraction, I worry. Till this day, I still feel bad if he missed his bed time nursing. 

It took me by surprise that my mother guilt is extremely strong when I have to feed my baby and I have to send my oldest girl to the living room to "just do something by yourself". She used to be the one I breastfed and holding so close to me all the time. Now all a sudden she seems to be such a grown up. 

Breastfeeding itself this time with my boy is not as hard I feel. Probably I now have more knowledge and more experience so I'm more mentally prepared. I'm glad that I could have so much support from my husband and a community of nursing moms helping me to understand that it's all so normal that it can be hard. And also, I can do it!

These struggles are all so real but not many people would tell an expecting mom that hey, breastfeeding is awesome but it's actually REALLY HARD, so prepare for it! Also, I feel that we need more willing people to help breastfeeding moms--take the older kids out for a walk so mom can take a nap; offer to hold the new baby when the baby is not nursing so mom can spend some quality time with the older siblings. 

I love breastfeeding. It's beautiful. It's literally the foundation of life. My journey continues. 

It's also hard. It's emotional. It could be something that drains the fountain of a mom's life. 

We should encourage moms to breastfeed. We also should help and build a community to really support moms who want to breastfeed but facing all these struggles I've gone through. 

We need to let new moms know that it's hard but it's worth the effort AND we are here to help! Reach out, and ask for help if needed. Let's ease each other's burden a little bit so more moms can enjoy the beauty of breastfeeding and provide the foundation of life to their babies!