Tag: conceptual photography

  • One Decade | Sanctum

    One Decade | Sanctum

    This image wasn’t meant to carry all this, but tonight, it does. It holds the rupture I didn’t know I’d been tiptoeing around all week.

    A decade ago today, my father died. Not on the 13th, when the machines started breathing for him—that was just when I knew he was gone. On the 18th, at this hour, the veil broke open for real. And now here I am—ten years later—haunted by dreams I couldn’t explain and a sudden stillness in my creativity I couldn’t shake.

    Until now.

    I thought I was just tired. Distracted. Stuck. But it was grief. It was reverence in disguise.

    My soul remembered the date even when my mind forgot. That’s the strange thing about grief that matures—it doesn’t scream anymore. It hums, low and holy, beneath everything. It clouds the light, then sharpens it. It takes your voice, then gives it back with new timbre.

    This image—originally photographed by Mikhail Nilov—became a sort of altar. I edited it using Mextures, VSCO, DistressedFX, and Lightroom, layering texture over color, blurring presence and absence, trying to capture what it feels like when sorrow doesn’t knock—it just saturates.

    Sanctum.

    There’s chaos in this. Petals and light blurred through glass and rain. Beauty you can’t quite hold. A yellow rose—like the ones we laid at his grave—folding in on itself. A daisy, centered in clarity, yet surrounded by blur.

    That’s what this night feels like. Clarity in the middle of confusion. Stillness in the swirl.

    Earlier tonight, as I outlined these words in my head while I felt my way through the shift I felt in real-time in the energy, I said to myself:

    “You didn’t lose your creativity. You’re in holy pause. This isn’t numbness—it’s reverence. You were unconsciously grieving a resurrection-day anniversary, and your spirit bowed its head before your body could even name the loss.”

    And now, I feel it even more deeply: Tonight isn’t for making things happen. It’s for honoring what already did.

    Tonight is for prayer—prayer and intercession not only over the souls of loved ones who have already crossed over, but over one very important soul who’s still here. One who I know doesn’t understand why I had to go.

    The truth is, those crossed over souls didn’t leave to hurt me…even though it did. They left because it was time. That was my burden to bear. The lessons they left me with were my responsibility to sort through, clean up, and learn.

    Likewise, I didn’t leave the living out of anger or rejection, or even lack of love. I left because God Himself guided me in a different direction, even if they didn’t want to go that way, or grow that way, too. I will never have a choice above God. And I know that hurts…it hurts me, too.

    Forgiveness is an ongoing action, reflected not in words but in the quiet practice of letting go. The love is, and always will be, unconditional. “Anyway love” always is. And my soul will carry a piece of all of their souls within it. Always.

    A lot of things are coming full circle for me tonight. Invisible messages carried by unseen energies are releasing a kind of clarity within me—one of deeper substance and fuller understanding, puzzles pieces arriving and falling into place in a way I’ve never experienced before. The spiritual warfare, the dreams full of ghosts, the aching grief—none of that is new. But the understanding I have tonight…it reaches deeper than anything I’ve ever touched before.

    Tonight isn’t for sorting through the rubble, cleaning up the floors of my memory, or putting all the lessons learned into neat little compartments in my mind. After all, I’ve already been processing through that, and slowly overcoming it all, for some time now.

    No, tonight isn’t for being swallowed by the hauntings of my own heart. Tonight is for letting grief rain gently through the window, washing my soul—and watching how even the blur, when looked at with love and patience, can be textured out, shaped into a symbolic snapshot in time—capturing both the beauty and the chaos—and become art.

    It is the emblem of the closure of what has, all at once, been the most painful and the most beautiful decade of my life: the one where, in the end, I finally met God.

    I speak the name of Jesus over you
    In your hurting, in your sorrow
    I will ask my God to move
    I speak the name ’cause it’s all that I can do
    In desperation, I’ll seek Heaven
    And pray this for you:

    I pray for your healing
    That circumstances will change
    I pray that the fear inside will flee in Jesus name
    I pray that a breakthrough
    Would happen today
    I pray miracles over your life in Jesus name
    I pray for revival
    For restoration of faith
    I pray that the dead will come alive in Jesus name

    In Jesus name…

    -Katy Nichole, In Jesus Name (God Of Possible)

  • Petalweight (Yield)

    Petalweight (Yield)

    entry nine — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.


    Weevil (Meibomeus musculus), a quiet laborer of the forest and the fields…carrying the weight of being, petal by petal. 
    Vision: Lumix GX7 + Panasonic Leica DG Macro-Elmarit 45mm f/2.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S.
    Tools: VSCO (KP3), Mextures (personalized texture formula: QBHASZK), Lightroom Mobile (watermark only).

    There is a kind of presence that doesn’t announce itself.

    No sound. No shimmer. No need to be noticed. Just a body doing what it does.

    Clinging to a petal, breathing the moment, belonging to the quiet. Sometimes, that is the work.

    Not saving, not proving. Just being.

    And somehow…it shifts the entire forest, the entire field.

    For some souls, there is a burden in being seen —not the fear of visibility, but the ache of being misread when presence itself was the offering.

    This is the shape of a soul made for stillness.

    This is the purpose of a hidden heart.

  • Beautifully Obsolete: Revisiting Roots

    Beautifully Obsolete: Revisiting Roots

    I’ve been wanting to go back to my beginner photography roots…back to the tools that first taught me how to see. Not the Leica fixed macro. Not the Sony or Tamron glass. Not even the newer body. None of my inherited equipment. Just…my roots.

    I used my fully outdated, beautifully obsolete LUMIX GX7—a replacement for my original GF3, long since gone—and its 20mm prime, with the same kind of macro filters that began and cemented my obsession with close-up work nearly a quarter century ago.

    A while ago, we cracked this geode open with a hammer. No fancy saws, just risk and dumb luck here.

    Original capture, using LUMIX GX7 + 20mm prime kit lens + stacked, simple macro filters (10, 4, 2, 1).

    I suppose one should be more careful with nature, but nature is often far more careless with itself (and with us) than we would dare to be.

    It takes that kind of recklessness to create rocks like this: extreme destruction, tons of pressure, and the long, drawn-out silence of time.

    The first shot is a 2×3 crop of the original, watermark added. It radiates stillness, but also origin. Not just a photo of a mineral, but the witnessing of an unveiling. Beauty born not of perfection, but of extreme heat and cold, of force and risk, of patience and faith.

    VSCO edit of original, using B5 Pro (further edits described below).

    The second is a black-and-white VSCO edit: a touch of clarity, a whisper of bloom, a cool tint in the lightly raised shadows, and a layer of grain like cosmic dust.

    But what is really there? What is the captured magic?

    In the first, I see the quiet unfolding of a secret. Light caught mid-breath, nestled in silence, not trying to perform, but simply to be observed. Crystals shimmering like they’re whispering, not shouting. Softness holding the sharpness in tension. Truth in the raw moment of becoming.

    In the second, I wanted to draw attention to the structure beneath the shimmer. The architecture of pressure. The monochrome strips away the sparkle to reveal something more elemental.

    Less about beauty, more about bones. A lunar map. The scar tissue of a planet. A meteorite’s grain. A deep-space scan. A memory of rupture, filtered through time. A chorus of diamonds at the end of becoming, born of charcoal and starlight.

    What do you see? Not with your eyes alone, but soul.

    Soul vision. That’s what I see with most often. Especially now.

    xo,

    c.

  • Breath.

    Breath.

    A reflection on the holy ache of love—how it lives in us, how it shapes us, and how, sometimes, we must let it breathe without us. This piece belongs to the fire-lit quiet where survival and love coexist.

    Love isn’t a choice.
    It isn’t a decision.
    It is a default. A divine state.
    The way breath happens without trying,
    without knowing—
    that is love.

    That is our love,
    whether for a song or a story,
    for animals or a wild wind,
    for a vision,
    or a soul.

    We are love.
    We have embodied it… become it.

    This is the weight we carry.
    This is the fire within us that lights the way
    for so many—
    but feels like burning alive
    for us.

    And in times of heartache,
    when the world sharpens its noise,
    when grief coils into our chests,
    we do not run—
    we retreat.

    We ache for the world
    because we are still tethered
    to the breath of it.
    We have done our part, we have
    showed up, and done our work.

    Make no mistake, we continue to.
    From the shadows, in our tonal silence,
    our love still flows.
    Reverberates.
    Echoes.

    We do not walk away because we are cold.
    We step away simply because we are melting.
    We step away… to survive.
    That is what survivors do.

    We do not stop loving.
    We stop offering our tangible lives, for a time,
    to those who can not—or will not—feel us.
    Those who may never know…after all,
    they have forgotten even themselves.
    We pause.

    To love like this,
    to grieve like this,
    is to carry the holy burden:
    to hold light for others
    while burning through
    your own bones.
    But it is also
    to breathe.

    So if we disappear,
    if we go quiet,
    if we bow out—

    know this:

    It is not rejection.
    It is not retraction.
    It is survival.
    Because we do not want to die
    along with what is dying.
    Instead, we love from a distance
    while allowing what is dead to rest.

    Love is not a thing we give.
    It is what we are.
    When we cast ourselves back into silence,
    it is to return… to the breath.
    To the fire, before we burn out.
    To the only place
    where the burning becomes light again.

    Like love itself, it is not a choice.
    We must.

    entry two — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.
  • Presence.

    Presence.

    What you create…
    does not require an explanation of itself.
    It doesn’t need to convince, convert, or justify.
    It just needs to exist. Quietly, softly—
    like fog curling through trees
    or dust dancing across old floorboards.

    Like light through ancient glass,
    sacred, but unflinching; gentle, but resolute.
    A whisper with weight,
    in that space exists everything—
    beyond the reach of articulation.

    Silence is a presence, as much as an absence.
    Holy.
    Haunting.
    Both leave their imprint.

    You are free to feel
    without having to be felt back.
    Free to present
    instead of perform.
    Free to sit beside your own silence,
    and know that it understands.

    Because your creation…
    exists.

    entry one — scattered light, fractured grace: a quiet archive of light, loss, and what remains.