My First Wedding

The very first wedding I ever shot was on a Saturday, and on Tuesday my images were on Martha Stewart. Four months later there was a full four page spread on my work in Professional Photographer Magazine and the rest should we stay is history. From then on I had somehow undeservedly become this phantom success that everyone wanted to figure out. Because of my perceived accomplishment in the photography world I suddenly seemed to know a secret that no one else could figure out. The emails flooded in from around the world, asking me how I did it, how did I make it? I didn’t understand. In my eyes I wasn’t successful yet, I was just beginning to figure this whole photography business thing out for myself.

My situation was the classic definition of success. Success is when preparation meets opportunity. In my case, it was preparation meets chutzpah meets damn good luck.

My first wedding was a referral from my oldest daughter’s 4th grade teacher. I had already been shooting portraits and headshots for years, and every year offered a free session to my children’s teachers and their families, just my way of saying thank you. Prior to my business taking off, I too was completing my credential program when I had to make a decision between teaching and photography as there was no way I could do both, and do both well, as well as be a wife and mother of four with two dogs and rotating reptiles. My first bride and groom were a dream come true in every sense of the word and are still two of our best friends to this day. She insisted on paying me, money I found difficult to accept as I had never shot a wedding before. She had faith in me from my work on my site and we moved forward on a minimal budget. Unbeknownst to me, she happened to be marrying the brother of a well-known actor on a prime time series. Although his brother looked familiar with his chiseled Hollywood good looks, I could not place his celebrity but found it comforting that placing his face eluded me. The wedding took place at the actor’s home in tony Sherman Oaks, he was best man, his wife maid of honor and their 2 little girls were flower girls. Where budget lacked, ingenuity reigned. The ceremony took place atop the hot tub covered with wooden planks and the reception held in their French colonial style backyard. The groom’s mother purchased clean lined roses in delicious pastels from the flower mart in downtown Los Angeles. Clusters of twisting pedals grouped in simple square glass containers graced the center of each table all to the tune of $250. Tealight candles nervously twitched around the flowers with a simple chocolate brown and white polka dotted ribbon. Her dress was a silken sheath, the groom beamed in a cream linen suit. Portraits were taken along a stone wall in front of their wooden fence dividing their properties, protocol was dismissed and joy abound.

I didn’t know how good I had it until this wedding put me on the virtual map of wedding photographers. I had no idea this simple, lovely, unaffected event would change my life forever. It was not any international wedding with secret service attached, nor was it a movie star which would dictate a five digit fee once my name was associated with them. This was a wedding occurring from sheer serendipity, with goodness and grass roots anchoring it solidly in reality. I did not have fancy camera gear. The entire wedding was shot solo, with a Nikon D-70, 2 batteries and an SB-800 flash, which I had no idea how to use properly. At this point I thought the head on it swiveled so I’d have something to play with if I got bored. I may not have had the best technical chops at this point for shooting weddings, but boy did I have heart. I knew just enough to work my ass off to get the shots. My heart raced in my chest from the moment I saw the flower girl staring up at her taffeta dress hanging on the closet door, to the middle of the ceremony when their youngest daughter crawled onto her grandpa’s lap and whispered in his ear. My palms sweat from the moment they kissed to the reception when the only way to get an over head shot of the reception, at night, was to crawl up on their roof. If there were ever a wedding boot camp, this was it for me, because it meant that much to me that there was no way in hell I was going to get it wrong, even if I didn’t know everything I was supposed to. I was going to figure it out and not miss a beat along the way. I was a wedding virgin, and my cherry had been popped. Just like your first time, it hurts a little, but no matter how much pain you feel, God forbid you let on that you are the least bit uncomfortable in fear of taking any joy away from the other party involved.

I left that night with blisters on my feet and a right hand that was frozen in the shape of a D-70. I barely slept that night, wired from the experience and watching late night TV as I excitedly imported each of my images (in jpeg mind you…I had no idea how to operate in Raw). In looking though my images, one by one certain images would grab my heart. It was a visceral response as to whether the image was truly special. The ones that were hit me like a burst of awe, almost an aha moment of a sudden knowing that something was completely right. Only these images did I pull together and master and emailed them over by morning to the bride and groom. It was only about 10 images from the night, but each I knew were solid, universal moments that would hopefully speak to the couple. Sunday afternoon I received a phonecall from the best-man-brother-actor. My heart stopped. I felt for sure I had done something terribly wrong, why else would he be calling me. Perhaps he was upset that I had climbed out on his roof. Did I break a shingle? For sure it was that I had snapped a twig from the tree during the ceremony so I could get a cleaner shot, or was it that I had fed their dog a piece of my leftovers and it got horribly ill and died…..My thoughts raced around my brain like greyhounds grasping for that piece of meat trying to make sense out of the purpose of his call before he could speak. Then he said, in his calm, eloquent drawl, “Micaela, I can’t tell you how much those images you captured of my family touched me. I going on Martha Stewart on Tuesday. How quickly can you send those files over to the producer in New York?” If my heart had stopped before, it was my tongue that now followed.

Anxiously recording the episode I sat in a surreal haze as I witnessed Martha Stewart congratulating him on his brother’s wedding and commenting on each of my images as they appeared full screen; how lovely the roses clung to one another in the vase, the essence of the day captured in such beauty…. From then on, things were different. My Nikon and I weren’t in Kansas anymore…..

Bensko Photography Theme Song

Fifty Years and Losing It…

     You came, you shot, you conquered...or so you thought. That's what I did. On vacation. Until I lost my camera. No, not the big fancy one. It was the disposable waterproof kind, but it would have been better had I lost my big one than to have lost the images I had on that rinky-dink plastic-cased excuse for a submarine.
     It was more than a summer vacation to San Diego, it was my wonderful in-laws' 50th wedding anniversary / family reunion, and I was darned if I was going to miss one shot from that entire weekend. With my husband's crazy schedule, my weekends mostly booked out, and with four children scrambling around, any time we are all together is like oxygen shot through a cellophane muzzle.

     So, when the opportunity rose to go sea-cave kayaking in La Jolla with our relatives, I left Big Bertha on land and picked up that yellow disposable which leers at you from the Walmart checkout stand. The one which makes your husband cringe, knowing the film will never truly be developed, confirming his prediction of 12.99 down the proverbial sea-cave...
     As I strapped on my life jacket and helmet, I secured my 12.99 waterproof Hasselblad in my vest pocket and set out on our journey of exploration.
     Throughout our great sea adventure, I proudly snapped away at every breathtaking moment we would never forget for the rest of our lives: kayaking over five foot tiger sharks lurking the ocean floor, pelicans soaring overhead our gaggle of gluttons for adrenaline, the joy on the face of my child with her daddy paddling away with the cliffs peaking, the tides swelling, Joey agog at the seals perched on their protruding bellies...and I caught every moment. I wound that camera like an archaic sewing machine, intuitively searching it's spine for a digital readout or picture display. Click, wind, click, wind, click...
     After two breathtaking hours of capturing images that I knew I would develop and slip into our incredible weekend of family reunion and anniversary images, we returned to our car. I reached for my plastic Hasselblad. I searched through my bag. We drove back to the hotel. We got out of the car. I had lost my camera. My plastic, waterproof submarine image creator had vanished, with every precious water-splashed lens dropping...gone.
     My heart imploded like a helium balloon sucked into a vacuum. My memories were gone, I had lost such a simple object, but it was my best friend through that journey. We clicked, we wound, we clicked, it scoffed at me when I asked it to show me a picture, it smelled like chemicals...it was perfect.
     This made me ponder what made me most sad...was it that I lost the pictures, or was it losing a part of the process that makes capturing memories so special? In my heart, I will never forget those incredible moments. No one will ever take those memories from me, not even the sea, so perhaps it was the process which swells in my soul, an addiction with waves of fulfillment confirming the preciousness of life.

     I do have one photo from that day however, one I took with Big Bertha before we set out, of the kids in front of some kayaks. We were at the wrong kayak place, these weren't the kayaks we paddled in, and we all changed our clothes before we launched, but you get the idea...

 "Joe, Cassie May, with cousins Turner and Mason, in front of the kayaks we didn't use in the store we weren't supposed to be at, in the clothing they didn't wear..."

And a few others from our weekend...

"Cousins at Bay"

"Utopia"

"Peace"

"I <3 U"

"Wonder"

"Awe"

"Gillette Poster Child..."

"Our Little Bugs"

"Joe"

"Uncle Dave's DilEmma"

"Fifty Years"

The Art of Balance

 Balance....If you Google the word (yes, I know google is technically a verb, but a name as well, ergo the capitalization, so live with it...;0) I digress...If you Google the word balance, you get fitness programs, health bars, scales, gymnastics schools, and most interestingly...disorders.
Yes, disorders. This is about the reparation of my own balance disorder.

According to the experts, with the lack of balance, you may feel as if the room is spinning. You may stagger when you try to walk or teeter or fall when you try to stand up, suffer vertigo, feel as though you are going to fall, feel confused or disoriented. I'm usually pretty balanced, or so I thought, give or take a vino here or there. But what happens when normalcy dissipates and suddenly your life becomes unbalanced due to elements out of your control? In our case it was a leak, two leaks, and toxic mold. A black furry Build-a-Bear type of fuzz that crackles when you think of touching it. It bathed the intestines of our drywall and threw us out on our derrieres and into an apartment with four kids and two dogs. Our entire downstairs had to be rebuilt, the kids were suffering allergic reactions to the furry beast, Emma on a nebulizer and Joe with asthmatic reactions, the house was deemed uninhabitable.


For many a night, snuggled in my favorite polar fleece jammie pants with little white bunnies in pink scarves, lavender oil slammed into the pores of my nasal passages, and the echo of Larry King dancing on the walls of my ear canals, my dreams had begun to take the form of Hitchcock, wavering with three dimensional angst and altered in a halo of distant obscurity. The upstairs neighbors vampires, stalking the corners of their apartment, renovating caskets with which to house their prey...

At first it was an adventure, something new. As my dear friend Lou said when she was diagnosed with the C-word, "Well, I'm looking forward to this actually, it's a NEW experience." So there we were, fleeing our home's C-word, and hovering the corner of a world we found completely foreign, trying to adjust.

In a matter of months, we have had to create an entirely new existence, and make it work for us, all the while the rest of the world stood strong, clients were still calling (Thank God), my husband still had to return to work, the children still had school, lessons, but childcare had completely bifurcated.
To balance work and home-life as a working mother is never, ever done alone. My friends jumped in whenever possible helping with pick-ups and drop-offs. 

Through this experience,  I've realized that as important as it is to have structure and balance within a home, it is just as important to have structure and balance within one's self. I had become so dependent on the physical structure of the home, the logistics of timing of schedules, the essentials of the daily calendar obeyance, that I had completely forgotten the importance of the balance within. I ate like a redneck at a meat-and-three diner. Exercise had become a verb simply used as an expression, and daily schedules had become a pacifier leaving me sucking away dependent upon the metronomic normalcy of life to feed me the oxygen needed for survival.

We moved into a tiny apartment, yet this apartment has taught lessons with a wooden ruler leaving precious splinters in the fingerprint of my soul. These are lessons learned which have breathed into us a new life-perspective.

You see, suddenly, as blessed as we still were of course, we had to now walk the dogs three times or more a day down a stairwell and through a gate to the boulevard roadside where our home's neighbors waited at the light to turn left to our old neighborhood. The occasional honk and wave of their hands, the uncomfortable nod and reserved smile, not wanting to show too much joy as they knew I was indeed now walking my dogs on the boulevard in front of our apartment and unable to return home. I'd wave and flash the largest smile I could muster which best complimented the roll of my eyes. Yet those walks woke something inside me which had previously grown accustomed to the laziness of opening the door to the back yard and dismissing the canines to the out of doors.

This was a sentence to take a new look at life. Those little walks outside, the obligation to my good furry friends, reminded me of the simplicity of smiling at fellow dog-walkers (while holding back my innocuously venemous Chihuaua with the Nepolean complex-mix and restraining my apoplectic Dachshund...) We had no childcare now, and I still had a company to run, weddings to shoot, clients to take care of, a husband who needed me present to help with insurance claims and raise our babies, contracting issues to address, as well as oodles of images to edit and laundry out the gege. I was back at square one, attempting to figure out HOW to "do it all". On top of all THAT, I turned 40.

Cathartic barely touches the surface.

Yet it was during this period of time major life changes were made, so that if life ever rears it's follically challenged head again, this girl is ready.

My entire system's internal ecosystem has been transformed from the inside out. Yes we were stuck in an apartment, but HEY, this building had a GYM! I exercised for the first time since my first child screamed in my ear! So what, one of my knees blew up like a blowfish with a bong, I was actually being healthy! Our increased visits to restaurants during our domestic expulsion made me realize the downstairs of our home wasn't the only thing needing reconstruction. I went on a complete health kick. Living in a small space made me realize that if I had to be stuck with myself in a small cell for the rest of my life, I had better like the way I FEEL. NOT look, but FEEL!!! Anyone who knows me knows there is not a french fry on this continent I have not overturned. No longer would I be labeled the Miracle Whip queen, or the Velveeta Princess (I'm not kidding...these are actual adjectives ingrained on my frontal lobe...).

My friend introduced me to the Flat Belly Diet way of life, and I'm born again. Look it up...your life will change.

So why is a photographer's blog talking about a domestic disturbance of the Home Depot kind? Because I've realized we can all try to do it all. We can all have balance when life is normal. But if I had had this other type of balance, the internal balance of a healthy lifestyle and healthier outlook on being internally balanced, this curveball could have been a much easier transition. It was during this transition that our lives were placed under the microscope and I realized what wasn't working. Even though everything had looked functional, it didn't mean I was present in the most intimate aspects of life.

In our apartment, our children share rooms, the youngest girls have decided that if we ever had to live in an apartment they'd do just fine as it is a glorified hotel in their eyes (only without the room service, maid service, spa service, concierge service...) We had birthdays in the park, walked around town and got to know our community better. The dogs have learned to walk on a leash, my husband has realized he really, really, really likes our house, and yes, our two teens, a boy and girl, have learned that they really do actually despise one another...and I have decided that no matter how busy life can be, I will never return to normal. Normal was redundant, expectant...As cramped as this apartment has been (we move back into our home next week) it is still not a tent in Haiti, or a shelter in Nashville or Oklahoma. We are blessed beyond words to know that our family, as dysfunctional as it can seem at times, is one which has been brought together
not only physically, but in spirit.

As excited as I am to return to our home, to have my workspace back, to put my photos back on the walls, a part of me will miss this little apartment. (A VERY small part of me...) But that part is one I need to keep close to my heart, as it taught me to simplify, that we don't need all of the "things" we thought we did. It has taught me to let house cleaning go a bit more and snuggle my babies more at night rather than do laundry. I've learned my children love art and coloring more than computer games, and I haven't visited Farmville once since we got here.

I love my home, my family, my friends, my clients, my life...and now with new balance the only teetering, vertigo, or nausea I am going to feel is from my arms spinning in relief as we re-enter our home, forgive it for it's indescretion, and remember the teacher with the ruler and the spintered fingerprints...forever.