It’s SO great any you can submit YOUR photos, too. I’m going to submit some later this week, too but my goal is to find and capture non-romantic love and also photograph people I don’t know. I am often seeing strangers I would love to photograph. This weekend, my challenge is to approach them and go for it.

I posted about this on FB, but if you haven’t already, check out this inspiring documentary about the original street fashion photographer,  Bill Cunningham.

“Let’s see how long she lasts” is one of those whispers that gets me out of bed like a bass driven Nike commercial.

I saw this recently and it jumped off the page:

“Arthur Hays Sulzberger was the publisher of The New York Times during the second World War. Because of the world conflict, he found it almost impossible to sleep. He was never able to banish worries from his mind until he adopted as his motto these five words – ‘one step is enough for me’ – taken from the hymn Lead Kindly Light.

…God isn’t going to let you see the distant scene either. So you might as well quit looking for it. He promises a lamp unto your feet, not a crystal ball into the future. We do not need to know what will happen tomorrow. We only need to know he leads us and ‘we will find grace to help us when we need it.’”
-Max Lucado from Traveling Light p. 52.

My favorites in the book were and continue to be the family photographs she included, particularly this magic-hour one of Paul and Mary that he used for the back of his album. I am not so much interested in the voyeur’s look into a celebrity life. I enjoyed her work because it was so universal: the love you feel for your baby, or your husband shielding her in his coat from the wind, or what it feels like to be on a day trip by the ocean on a certain afternoon with your family. You know, the good stuff.
photo by Linda McCartney

I had no idea that Mary McCartney {the baby in the image above} became a photographer as well. My mom gave me Mary McCartney’s book of photography From Where I Stand for Christmas this year. It is so lovely. The most moving images to me are the ones that have nothing to do with celebrity, but instead real emotion and relationships. If you click around her website, I’d skip the fashion stuff and the ad campaigns and go straight to her more behind-the-scenes Exhibitions work. Those are the real storytellers.

*I’ve been meaning to share my friend and amazing photographer Brooks’s engagement shoot with Lonnie Webb here. I LOVE Brooks’s photography as well which is always influenced by dance, movement and romance.

*I’m obsessing about finding the perfect white fairy lights like in Nigella’s house. I could watch her Christmas videos again and again.

*I did not get to make a December Daily book this year {sigh} but I am still inspired by Ali Edwards’s Daily journal here.

{Aqua trees from Kate’s Cottage on Etsy}
Happy Holidays everyone!

*I heard this song {What’s The Altitude -Cut Chemist & Hymnal} in my husband’s car the other day and, I can’t get it out of my head. The video is cheeky, but the song is good. If you like Cut Chemist, you might check out his song, The Garden which samples one of my all-time faves, Astrud Gilberto {mom of Bebel Gilberto, once married to Joao Gilberto}. I spend most summers with their family in my headphones.

*The mini films of Shark Pig are incredible. I wanted to share this one for my brides, many of whom have told me that they want to create a cool experience for their guests at their wedding. Some fun ideas here:

*I’ve revisited some of the scenes from the film adaptation of Snow Falling On Cedars. Did you ever see that movie? It is so beautifully made and always gives me photography inspiration. Also, I forward through some of the heavier scenes so that I don’t end up like The Crying Wife, hyperventilating in a puddle of mascara.

After a really tough time when we lost a baby, he wrote me the most beautiful love letter that said he would love me in sunshine and shade. This is our 12th year together and I hope he always feels that way. Maybe that’s why this video really resonates with me, as all love does.

These two have entered a contest via Snippet & Ink to win fabulous engagement photos with ABryan Photo in New York. You can click here and vote for Lauren if you want them to win. I love this so much.

Just when I think he’s my favorite of the day, his twin brother does something equally endearing, like telling me stories about how he’s planting carrots and how there could be a storm. He will dig lots of dirt to make a safe home for them so that the Were-Rabbit doesn’t come to get them. As you can see, this is very serious business.

They are the most loving, precious boys and their parents are pretty amazing people, too. I’m really blessed to know them.

To see more images from this session, click here.

Soon, I hope to spend time with my new book, The Writer’s Desk by Jill Krementz that I picked up via Amazon Goodwill for $7 bucks which is absolute aces because it’s out of print. On the cover is my homegirl, Eudora Welty.

The photographs are great, but the quotes from the authors themselves are just as fascinating, like this one from Saul Bellow:

“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.” -Saul Bellow, Brattleboro, Vermont 1995 p. 99

Good luck with your work and with your sleep, but most of all with your moments of stillness in the midst of chaos.