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Category: Reflections

Why I Lose Sleep Over Travel…and Choose it Anyway

As I’m deep in the planning process lately, I’ve been thinking about travel and what it means to me. As most of you know, my heart has been restless for faraway places as long as I can remember. I “blame” my parents for this, as they were the first ones who planted the seed of travel in me. Although I spent my childhood in Communist Poland, where foreign travel was technically prohibited unless to other Communist countries, my parents had always found a way somehow to visit other places distant from our home. We’d pack our car…

Photographer’s Manifesto

I have been thinking a lot recently about how social media affects photography and influences certain style. There are specific trends on Instagram for example that keep cropping up consistently and I feel as if there is tremendous pressure to follow them. What if the photography that you choose to shoot is different than mainstream? What if what you like to create does not fit into any category or cannot be neatly placed into a box with a specific label on it? Does that mean you should not share your work? Is your work only valid if it receives a…

Six Ways Photography is Changing the World (at least our personal one)

A challenge post on why I love photography and choose to write about it: Photography is an art of memory keeping Many times we snap pictures to document something beautiful, but we don’t realize that it is memories we are making. Tangible memories that can be revisited and relived anytime we pick up that photo (hopefully we’ve printed the digitals because prints, let’s face it, are just sooo much better). Memories of loved ones, times spent with friends, memories of trips whose details are long forgotten. Photography keeps these safe for us in the physical space of…

Reflections on Nicaragua and The Giving Lens

I always wanted to travel with The Giving Lens photography workshop. I’ve believed for a long time that PHILANTHROPY AND PHOTOGRAPHY go beautifully together. Pictures have the power to change ideas and drive about social change. That’s been proven time and time again. And I finally found an organization that is based on this belief. I was stoked to join them in Nicaragua. That being said, I didn’t know what to expect. The Giving Lens (TGL) group has been pairing up with Empowerment International (EI) for the past few years. Their mission is to break the cycle…

Why I started this blog anyway…

I am what I’d call “a struggling artist.” Not in the strict sense of the word where you’d imagine me sitting in a corner of some street in Europe, enticing any passerby for a portrait painting session, trudging to make a living. I’d call myself “struggling” because everyday I find myself faced with obstacles to my creative inner forces. Obstacles like a full time job for example. I am not one of those brave souls who have chosen to ditch the moneymaking careers to pursue their more creative passions. I have spent half my life getting an…