So as many of you already know, I had the opportunity to attend the Undone Workshop led by Meg Bitton and Stacie Turner outside Hartford, CT. The minute they announced the workshop, I knew I was going one way or another. There was simply no way that this event was going to happen with me not taking part in it. So the expectations were high and continued to increase over time as more and more friends from ilp announced that they would also be attending. I am a firm believer that the other participants really help determine the quality of the workshop, so I reached out to several people that I thought would make the experience even better – I was determined to make this be an incredible weekend.
So the day finally came when it was time to fly out. Unfortunately, my kid’s school planned their back to school night on Friday night so I decided to catch a 1 am flight out that night and arrive at the workshop right around noon on Saturday. I had enough time to stop by the hotel where everyone was staying and pick up the directions that Meg and Stacie had kindly left for everyone, along with a bottle of water for the drive. After getting off an airplane (or two) and driving an hour, that little thoughtful touch of having a water bottle waiting for me did not go unnoticed.

The drive to workshop location was incredible. I’m a Colorado girl and we have trees, for sure, but we just don’t have the lush, deep green, thick vegetation look here. You see it in Washington too and it’s very much different than where I live. It’s also the east coast. And there is money in them der hills. Beautiful, to say the least.

I arrived at the location to find out that the workshop was going to be held at the summer home of Meg’s parents. The location is just to die for and her parents, husband and daughter were there too. Meg came out to greet me and gave me a huge hug and then I got to come in and meet Stacie. It was fascinating to meet both of them. Meg is the only child of clearly very well educated, successful, proud parents. And Meg is the quintessential, non-apologetic artist that you see on ilp. She has a commanding presence but makes you feel completely at ease. Stacie is softer than you might think. A little more soft-spoken, gentle features, laughs a lot, and has piercing blue eyes. She has the type of eyes that if you were to photograph her and post on ilp, people would tell you that you overdid the eyes. She has so many thoughtful things to say but you sort of don’t hear them all because her eyes kind of hypnotize you. She very well could have been asking me to give her my credit card to buy her new camera toys and I would have just nodded and did what she told me to do. Think Shere Khan in the Jungle Book. But she’s a good person and I don’t believe she abuses the power her eyes give her.

We started off with the nicest lunch of wonderful bread and a very filling salad with a trio of salad dressing options and chocolate chip cookies. It was the perfect meal to start a workshop off with because it wasn’t heavy and we could all concentrate on what was coming next. Meg’s husband insisted we all leave the table and go start the workshop while he cleaned up. This guy was amazing the whole weekend. You don’t know this, but Meg met him when she was 12. They are total soulmates and he pampered all of us for the weekend. Not only did he provide a killer spread for dinner from the grill but he was our go-to IT guy. He was helping people with the camera settings, helping people with their laptop issues, setting up Lightroom for editing on a borrowed laptop, etc. Don’t you want one of your own now?? I know I do.

Then we started the workshop and there was a table set up with our goody bag (yes, goody bags!!) and our workshop workbooks with all sorts of cool things to read, and fill out, and discuss which is exactly what we did for the next several hours.

Then it was time to watch Meg and Stacie take Meg’s daughter, Jordyn, out for a shoot. It was so interesting to meet Jordyn. From all her photographs, which I might have studied a few hundred times, you would think she’s this mature, soulful young woman who will sit down with you and discuss the benefits of a liberal arts education. But she’s really just a giggly, super happy, confident, energetic little ten year old – just like she should be. She can give her mom the look her mom is looking for but it’s just a fleeting moment in between laughing and running and singing and Meg makes sure she doesn’t miss it. It was fascinating to watch Meg and Stacie shoot. They are each masters yet they capture such different looks. They make it look so effortless. And perhaps, after all these years, it does take less effort for them but you know they are working and thinking and watching. Yet it doesn’t have that underlying feeling of stress that I always have in my shoots – will I get the shot? will this kid lose interest? what the hell setting am I on anyway?? etc etc

After the shoot we were served a wonderful meal of all sorts of options that David had grilled for us. And wine. And we were HUNGRY. As dinner was wrapping up, the models begin to arrive for the evening shoot. I believe we had 4 or 5 young models and two older girls. Meg had a stack of clothes she had bought for us to style the girls in which you will see in the photos in the Undone thread (and I’ll start to process mine shortly and post too). Seriously, they thought of everything and the clothing was just awesome. We drove up to a neighbor’s property for the shoot. It wouldn’t even be worth trying to describe this place. In a few words: breathtaking, elegant, sophisticated, manicured, todiefor. Uhhh – amazing location.

Then it was time to return home and have s’mores!!! And we sat around and talked on couches resting our feet until about 10:30 pm. I could have stayed all night but we were all tired and they workshop was starting at 6 am so it was time to return to the hotel. Before going to bed, Inna (pronounced eeeenna, not eyenna) and Tessa came to my room and visited for about an hour. I adore both of them. Just being given the opportunity to talk for an hour with them was another highlight of this workshop.

6 am came way too soon and we were headed to Meg’s parents home for pastries and photos. I’m not saying that I did this, but it turns out that you can eat 4 chocolate croissants and not vomit. Who knew?? Then 7 models arrived around 6:30 and we started to shoot again. Watching Meg shoot is crazy. What I didn’t know is that Stacie was shooting inside upstairs with Tessa and Jessica and I missed out on that. I came inside looking for them but didn’t realize they were upstairs and headed outside again. That is a bummer for me because the bed photographs I have seen posted are crazy good.

After the shoot it was time to watch Meg edit in photoshop. It’s funny because I’m trying to write this up and yet I feel like there aren’t really the right words to describe what she does. I can bore you with amazing, incredible, insane etc but they won’t capture it unless you see it yourself. She is a master at photoshopping. The first image she decided to edit, I would have tossed it. She turned it into a masterpiece. Everyone sat there with their jaws hanging open. If you could buy this stuff, I’d empty out my 401K for it. But you can’t.

Then it was Stacie’s turn to show us what she does with her black and whites. She went through a very elaborate process of her steps and I was frantically taking notes. And then she emailed us the action she built to make it easier. Oh, god, thank you. She REALLY understands tonality and contrast, and lighting to such a deep degree. I don’t know how to do it but I know I love it when I see it.

And then a wonderful lunch, some final discussions, questions, feedback etc and it was time to go.

It’s hard for me to explain what this workshop did for me. It was perfectly named. Undone. And, for me, could not have come at a better time for me in this journey. I could feel myself going down a certain path, knew where it was taking me, wasn’t sure what I could do to stop it. And that place isn’t a bad place. Not at all. I just knew it wasn’t where I really wanted to be going.

And now I’m going to get all philosophical on you and share some deeper thoughts about me and my own journey. And maybe this will help some of you on your own journeys.

I am a believer that things happen for a reason and that things come together at the right time and you have to be there and prepared to take advantage of it. As I boarded the first plane, I happened to open up facebook one last time and I saw this post from ilp’s own Lila about a blog about a child dying and how the mom was coping.

http://aniandmatttay…perpective.html

It touched me very deeply and I was quietly crying on the plane as I was leaving my two own kids to do something that mattered to me. On some days, it even seems to matter more which is a problem. And I’m thinking that I wonder how much my kids will even miss me because I haven’t been such a great mom lately. Always rushing, never wanting to play, yelling at stupid things. And yet my Lila was sobbing the night before that she didn’t want me to go because I was going to die (exactly what you want to hear when you are boarding a plane in 4 hours). And I was praying to some power to please let me not die and I’ll come home from Undone and I’ll work harder at being the mom I need to be to them and that they deserve.

And then on the second day of the workshop, Stacie read a quote to us by Ira Glass that has been making the rounds. And I want to write it out for you here because I’ve seen it a bunch in that little video but it didn’t sink in for me. I didn’t hear it, really hear it, until Stacie read it slowly to me and it hit me like a truck.

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

And this is where I have been. Feeling like such a fraud lately. And not understanding why. I haven’t even really been able to post for CC very much because it just feels like I screw everything up and never get that image I see in my head. Or get that look that I see other people achieve that just speaks to me. Such as Meg Bitton’s work. For some reason, her work touches me and makes me realize how inferior I am in what I am producing.

What Stacie and Meg did for me this weekend was give me the courage and the excitement to go out and FAIL. I’ve been so hung up on trying to get the PERFECT picture that I’m missing all these opportunities to learn from the photographs that didn’t even come close. For some reason, I needed to hear that from them. And to know that it is from the failures that I am going to grow if I will just keep at it. That over time, I will start to suck less but it’s going to take work, time, and dedication. I have wanted to quit so frequently lately. To just write it up to “well, Meg and Stacie are lucky people that were born with a gift and I didn’t get that gift so I’ll go find something I can do well.” But that completely disregards how hard they have worked at this. And how they have struggled and pushed through to close that gap and start to deliver work that matches their vision and speaks to other people.

I don’t know if Meg and Stacie will ever do another workshop. I can tell you that it was evident how hard they worked to put this one together. We all felt pampered, spoiled, cared for and supported by them. Every last detail was carefully planned out to create a magical weekend for us. And that takes time and energy, particularly in the busy season. But more than that, we forced them to talk to us and verbalize the things they do so well, so masterfully, so effortlessly after all this time. And THAT takes energy and work. I know they were tired. Hell, I was exhausted myself. And that is exactly why I asked some people here to come with me. I knew this weekend was going to change me. And I knew there was a risk that when you ask masters of their art to verbalize and teach it, they will find it draining and difficult to verbalize something that comes from so far within. But they did. For us. And they took me to a new place. I thought I was going to walk away from this workshop thinking to myself, “wow, Meg and Stacie are just other photographers like me.” But I left Sunday in even more awe of what they create and who they are as people.

On an even more personal note, Meg has been my mentor for several months now. And it’s been a slow process because I just keep getting hit with $#!# over and over from my family and I can never seem to catch my breath anymore. But she didn’t give up on me. And Meg taught me this weekend to not give up on myself. I went to my first shoot yesterday since the workshop and I approached it with the attitude that I’m going to screw up a ton of photos here. I’ll get them their gallery of images that are pretty enough, but I’m going to work to take some sucky photos and then study them and figure out what I did wrong. And what can I do next time to make it right.

If you ever get the chance to work with them, do not let the opportunity pass you by. Should they teach another workshop, you’ll be fighting me for a coveted ticket to the event, I can assure you.

To Meg and Stacie-
Thank you for sharing your art with us. Thank you for sharing your heart with us. Thank you for believing in yourselves enough to show us that we can believe in ourselves too. I know that every participant left this workshop with the knowledge that we have two masters of their trade rooting for us. And that they will be there as friends, be available for guidance when we can’t see the light anymore, and will always care about the journey we are each taking. I love both of you very much. Thank you for letting me be part of something so special.

My final thought is that there are still really good people in the world. The trip home turned into one of the worst travel days I have ever had (second only to a 7 hour delay trying to get to Seattle for an Alaskan cruise that left 20 minutes before we arrived). During the chaos of trying to get a refund on my ticket in order to buy a new ticket, I left my ipad at the Delta Courtesy desk. By the time I got back there, it was gone. I spent the entire flight home creating a scenario in my head where the person who took it had got into facebook and sent every friend a racist note, deleted all my emails and contacts, bought tons of stuff on amazon, and downloaded $4K worth of porn. I was literally just sick about it. When I arrived at DIA, I logged onto ilp and saw a note on ilp that my ipad had been found. A business man in a similar travel nightmare had picked it up at the courtesy phone and put it in his briefcase because he knew it would never be seen again if he turned it into lost and found. His wife fedexed it to me yesterday. I am so grateful to them.

And with that said….