Well this is weird.

This will be the first real blog post in almost five years, not that it matters though. (The post right before this was an older wedding, I had just hastily published it because I was trying to book a client and wanted a wedding in the recent posts). Anyway, this one is from a shoot in June 2017 with Beth Dodge.

I posted the other day on my Instagram story about accidentally ghosting models after trade shoots. It happened to me as the subject in a photo shoot by Jay Eads in 2015. He never sent me the photos or communicated about them at all, so I always assumed that he just didn’t care. I defaulted to the assumption that he didn’t care for the photos and so the only ones that he wanted to share were the two that randomly showed up on his social media; that much was pretty much accepted as fact in my mind, the only question was why?

He was the one who approached me about doing photos, but then he put all the pressure on me to direct the shoot itself. I wasn’t confident enough at the time to just straight up ask, “why are we doing these photos? Who’s creative energy is supposed to be at play here? Am I supposed to offer to pay him even though he approached me? Am I entitled to ask for these free photos after not hearing anything for several months/years or should I just let Jay contact me when he feels it’s appropriate (or get over the fact that he doesn’t seem to care)?”

My self esteem was literally the only thing stopping me from realizing it was possible Jay just made a mistake, as the case turned out to be. He just forgot to send the photos to me, apparently. Which in actuality doesn’t really feel any better - to be forgotten rather than disliked. But this is a common theme inside my head - I tend to assume that if no one is reaching out to me, it’s because they just don’t want to, not because they are fully independent people with flaws or anxiety or circumstances of their own.

And it’s hypocritical because I’ve done the same exact thing to people who were the subjects of my own photos (via trade, I’d never do this to a paying customer). I mean I’ve never just not communicated at all, but I’ll promise things that I never deliver, and while I always have my own reason the person on the other end is left in the dark. So I’m really sorry to anyone who’s experienced that from me.

This shoot with Beth was in June 2017 and I had already let this project slip through the cracks for almost a year, but on April 3rd, 2018 I was suddenly determined to finish these up and send these photos to the model. That night is when my kitty went missing.

It was such a good day, too. We had spent the early afternoon in Ashland and it was one of those amazing spring days. We were driving back to Oregon after having finally finished building out the van down in Arizona. We were only on our second official week of vanlife. We built the interior of the van specifically to accommodate my kitty and we only got to enjoy it with her for two weeks.

That evening we found a campsite outside Ashland and opened a bottle of high proof whisky we had bought from a local distillery in Nevada. I was watching Kershaw’s first start of the season for the Dodgers. Anders and I had been working towards establishing a commercial photography business and I was building our vanlife/photography instagram page. I was sober from marijuana. We were microdosing. We were excited for everything and I felt like life seemed to be actually coming together for the first time.

After kitty left it took a long time to care about anything, let alone revisit this shoot I was almost done with that day. One of my last memories of my best friend was pushing her off my lap so I could work on these photos. I will never forgive myself for that, or for drinking that whisky, or for not being diligent about closing the van doors while we were cooking dinner.

So now this photo shoot that in 2017 was a celebration of my studio building and my new outlook on people photography has turned into a somber memory of the worst day of my life, that had started out so nice.

I miss my kitty so much.