Lancaster Photography Association

Lancaster Photography Association was pleased to have Elizabeth Toller come and speak to us about The Power of the Personal Project. She was very insightful, speaking about creating room in our lives for creativity to blossom.

Summary

Elizabeth Toller's talk explores the "power of the personal project" - using creative rituals and habits to unlock inspiration and adapt to challenges. She shares her own journey, from a ballet dancer to a portrait photographer to a still life artist, and the importance of developing daily creative routines. Toller emphasizes the value of creative daydreaming, overcoming doubts, and mastering skills to enable innovative thinking. She provides practical advice on establishing rituals, combating fear, and leveraging creativity in both personal and professional contexts. Toller's insights highlight how cultivating creativity as a lifestyle, rather than a one-off activity, can lead to greater fulfillment, problem-solving abilities, and professional success.

Full Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:20):

Okay. As Kathy said, tonight's speaker is Elizabeth Toller. She came up from Orange County. She's going to be discussing the power of personal projects. She's born into a creative family. It's always been a central part of her life. She began as a dancer and eventually became a professional ballerina. When she was about 10 years old, she was given a point and shoot camera, which she loved and took everywhere with her friends and family. Always admired her pictures after a car accident ended her dancing career. She enrolled in college seeking a new creative outlet. She took photography classes and fell in love with the magic of the dark room, realizing that photography would be a lifelong passion. After college, she continued her photography education through travel workshops and found gallery representation for her street photography. As her siblings and friends began having children, she started taking snapshots, which quickly turned into requests for wall portraits.

(01:12)
Of course, she knew what they were referring her to friends, and she found herself with a growing business. For many years, she loved running a portrait studio, but then life took a series of difficult turns. The economy collapsed. Her best friend passed away. Suddenly her work lost his creative spark and she focused solely on what would sell, and her mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's dementia. She eventually closed her studios to care for her mother. After her mother's passing, she sought a creative outlet and rediscovered photography, and she transformed her dining room into a studio and began working in a series of still life images for a gallery while also returning to street photography. Her purpose in life is to be a service to others. This calling is inspired her to write a book called The Power of the Personal Project. She intends this to help others looking to elevate their life and art to new levels. Here is Elizabeth.

Elizabeth (02:07):

Thank you so much for allowing me to come share my thoughts with you today. So the power of the personal project, what is it? The project is our life and the power is finding the creative strategy to elevate your life and your art. The purpose is to challenge our process and develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and to connect to the world. What makes it powerful is taking our daily habits and elevating them to a level of ritual where they just become so much a part of yourself that you don't have to think about them so that you can move into what I call creative daydreaming.

(02:52)
And creative daydreaming is where athletes talk about the zone. People talk about the flow of life, that what I call creative daydreaming, and it's all about being prepared. And with preparation for being creative, there is no doubt or fear and you can elevate your life and your art to brand new levels. Andrew already introduced a lot of what who I am and what I'm doing. As I said, I was born into a very creative family. My grandfather was a chef and a photographer. My mother was a painter. All my aunts were poets, designers, painters, you name it, craft wise, they did it.

(03:37)
My sister was a costume designer for the theater, but my father is probably the most creative person I've ever met. He started programming computers in 1958 when they had 2K of memory. Some of you're laughing, you know that he was working on computers about the size of this room. I started as my life as a ballet dancer and did that until I was in a car accident in my early twenties. My mother always spot me point and shoot cameras when I went to summer camp and I would wear those cameras out taking pictures. I loved it. And all of my family and friends were just always amazed at what I could do with that little point and shoot camera. Like I said, my grandfather was a photographer and he helped a lot teach me about photography. That was kind of our activity. When I went to spend the day with grandma and grandpa, we'd wander around and take pictures of the neighborhood.

(04:32)
So like I said, after I was in a car accident, I rolled in college and we found photography in the dark room in a way that I had never known that I could enjoy photography. I loved the smell of the chemicals and the magic that made them happened. So after college, I went to work for lawyers and to keep myself sane. I continued to travel the world studying photography. I even went to France to study street photography with a former assistant of Henry Cartson. And then my friends and family were all having babies and I thought it would be so cool to take some really nice snapshots of them and they wanted wall portraits. And the next thing I knew I had a business. So I did that for about 10 years and then the bottom fell out of the economy. My friend died. My mother was diagnosed with Parkinson's dementia, so I found myself back in the legal field to make a living, why I took care of my mother. Then after she died about four years ago, I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I had no creativity, no creative outlet. So I went and bought myself a camera and took up photography again, spent my time learning Photoshop and the whole digital world.

(05:47)
And it also inspired me to research creativity and what creativity really is, and that's what brought me to writing the book called The Power of the Personal. I'm also working on a series of still life's called Life Gone Wrong. I'm also an intuitive coach. I use my abilities as a psychic, medium tarot reader and reiki healer to help people find their blocks and their creativity and help them overcome them for their life, their business and their art. So what I discovered in all of my research about creativity is for me it's a very spiritual thing. It connects me to my higher power God source, whatever you want to call him or her, and it connects me to the deeper part of myself and also to the world in general.

(06:40)
And it's the ability to make my own zone or flow whenever I want so that I can get into that creative mode so that I can show the world my view of it through my art with living a more creative life, I have found that the decision fatigue that we all experience daily has come down to a minimum. I'm able to disconnect myself from the moment to moment decisions of life and to move through it and see the bigger picture of what I'm doing with my life. Most importantly, creativity is a habit and the habit prepares for the spark of inspiration. Most people think that creativity just comes out of thin air. The lightning bolt hits, you've got this great idea you're winning the Antelope County fair with blue ribbons. It is not that way and habits are something very routine and boring, but they're really the foundations for our life. And when we create habits that are that foundation, it gives us that inspiration for when we do see that lightning bolt because we see more of the lightning bolt than just the flash. We see the colors, we see the shadows, we see the shapes, we see the texture, and that gives us so much more than if we just saw the flash of light itself.

(08:20)
So we all have habits. It's a learned way of behavior, good or bad. So when we establish really good habits that are the foundation, we can level them up to a ritual where they happen without us even thinking there's a prompt. And the ritual starts. If any of you're Catholic, you certainly know what happens in the ritual of the Catholic mass. You don't have to think about what goes on. It just happens. And we can do that in our everyday life with our habits. So a prompt can be anything. It can be an action, it can be a time, it can be a situation.

(09:09)
For me, it all starts in the morning about six 30 just before my alarm goes off, when my cat steps on my bladder, I don't even have to think about what happened next. It just happens and I had to spend quite a bit of time thinking about this and writing it down what I do every morning to get myself ready to go out to my day job. And then when I get to the day job, I have a whole nother series of rituals that I do. So my day starts with an action. Yours could start with the time. I also have rituals that start every Tuesday and Thursday at 7:00 PM I sit down with my computer and all my notes and I work on my book without fail. A situation could be, I have a family member that is very sarcastic, so when they make sarcastic comments that I don't like, I have some really witty comebacks for them and I don't even have to think about those witty comebacks anymore.

(10:13)
So as my day moves along at the day job, I have a lot of specific tasks that have rituals that go with them. And these rituals, like I said, just keep you from having to think about every moment of the life and making a decision every moment of your life. So when you have these rituals, it gives you the creative daydreaming where you don't have to think about your day-to-day life. You can just think about what you want to do, whether it be your next photography project, a challenge at work, a challenge at home, just a challenge in life. I was recently working with one of my intuitive coaching clients and she really wants to level up her real estate business. When I was reading the cards for her, it kept coming back to that there is some things in her subconscious that will really elevate her business to make it the Miriam experience. Instead of just working with yet another realtor, she will be able to create a very interesting and unique experience for her clients. And she does this with her creative daydreaming. She's able to stop and listen to what's coming out of her subconscious, not the negative thoughts, but the really good ideas that attracted your subconscious. So rituals are really great friendly reminders that you're doing what you need to do for right now and it can transform your day from what I'm doing. And why am I doing this? To the Nike slogan? Just doing it.

(12:01)
Rituals also give you a sense of accomplishment and give you the energy to move through your day. As you move from one task to another, it gives you that sense of accomplishment so you can keep moving forward, keep doing more things, keep being more productive. It also gives you the time, space, and clarity to unlock that free thinking that gets you into this creative daydreaming mode. Admiral Mc Raven wrote a really great book called Make Your Bed, and in there he talks about the ritual of making your bed every morning. And his premise is, is that you have accomplished one thing in your day so that you can move on to do other things during your day. And even if you have a really bad day and don't get anything else accomplished, you can say, I made my bed today at Imaging USA. This past January.

(12:55)
There was a speaker, Owen Fitzpatrick, and he was talking about making commitments to your business and to your creativity. So he had everybody write down what their commitment was and then some people shared, and my favorite was one lady said that as she's sitting on the toilet, she's going to stop the social media death scroll and actually create a social media post. So her prompting is when she sits down on the toilet, she needs to start creating a social media post. And that's where I made the commitment that every Tuesday and Thursday night at seven o'clock to nine o'clock, I was going to sit down with my laptop and really commit to writing this book. And I got to tell you that first Tuesday night was really difficult. I sat there with all my notes and staring at that blank page, but once I got through that first Tuesday night, everything seemed so much better. And now it's a really sacred time for me. I will not schedule anything on Tuesday and Thursday nights from seven to nine except, except for you guys.

(13:59)
But this is also part of writing my book, is presenting it to other people and getting the feedback of what I am creating in the book. And I got to tell you, a lot of Tuesday and Thursdays I get through the day at my day job only thinking about that I get to write my book that night. Ultimately, the ritual allows us to be prepared for the creative inspiration. So why should we be prepared? As photographers, we've all learned how to use our camera, use our lens. We've learned what depth the field is. We've learned an F-stop and a shutter speed. We've learned about composition. We need to do that with creativity as well.

(14:51)
You need to practice all of the skills so that they become part of you so that when you're out in the world and you want to create an image, you don't have to think about what shutter speed do I need? What f-stop that. You're just able to set up the camera and capture that moment in time because 50% of photography is being there. So reasons to prepare for creativity, problem solving, I'm sure all of us every day come across new and interesting things that we are challenged with and how do you take care of those in a new and interesting way? At my day job, I got to tell you, most of my day is problem solving. Somehow I became with the fix it girl. Somebody makes a mistake and I'm the one who gets to fix it. So being creative in that problem solving is something I use just about every day.

(15:54)
Oh, there we go. Adaptability so that you can be quicker with your responses, with everything that you're doing in your personal life or business, that you can generate new ideas and stay flexible to those ideas. My day at my day job is all about being adaptable. My priorities change moment to moment. I may not even get a finish one fire before. The next one is burning innovation. If you look at the marketplace, some of the most creative people have come up with some pretty ingenious products to bring to market personal fulfillment. For me, being creative and living a creative life gives me the time to create the art that I want to do.

(16:50)
It also gives you a competitive edge in this world of AI that is taking over, having that competitive edge of being more creative than ai, being different than ai, not looking like ai, not acting like AI is going to be huge in our world. Also gives the emotional resilience. When you're faced with lots of issues, you're able to pivot, you're able to look at the next situation, the next thing come up with a way to move forward through it, over it, under it. And when you're more creative, people want to work with you, natural collaboration just happens. People want to work with the most creative person in the room.

(17:45)
So creativity is not just for artists, it's an everyday world. It's how you close a sale. It's how you give advice to a friend. It's how you parent your child. It's how you drive your car. It's everywhere. So being more creative just makes us a more efficient, functioning human being. And by having habits of practicing creativity, we can move through our days so much easier and we can address any challenges with a fresh new perspective. Creativity helps in our decision making for everyday life, finding better ways to organize, schedule to resolve interpersonal conflicts. As I mentioned, my father was a computer programmer back in 1958 with 2K of memory. He was very creative in trying to figure out how to use that 2K to do everything that he needed to do. He was writing programs for retail stores to computerize all of their inventory. Think about stores today and how to do that In 2K of memory, my grandfather was also a chef. He worked in high-end restaurants and his creativity came out in the meals he prepared, always looking for new and different ways to create a meal for his clientele, and always looking for ways to improve the flow of his kitchen so that his patrons would have a better seamless experience at his restaurants.

(19:23)
So some people that I've been studying about their creativity, the first is Marie Carey. First of all, she was a woman in a male dominated field, so she had to be creative on how she negotiated all of those relationships. And then she was able to look at the current methods and the materials that they had and how that we could use them differently so that she can up with radiotherapy treatments for cancer. Walt Disney was a great problem solver. He was having troubles with his animation in sinking the sound, and he came up with a whole system of how to sync the sound to the animation so that it was all very seamless. He also came up with technicolor. Before that cartoons animation had mostly been in black and white, so he figured out how to make it color and we all take Disneyland for granted. But he's the one who created this immersive storytelling experience for people. It's not just a carnival, it's a whole experience of the story.

(20:35)
Nelson Mandela, Maha Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. All had dreams and they were able to use their words and actions to motivate huge portions of populations to create change for the better. So Netflix, Reed Hastings was a visionary. He saw that the world of movies and TV was all about streaming and he figured out how to do it. Brian Chesky saw that travel was changing, so he created Airbnb and I'm very happy that he did. I'm going to New Orleans in a few weeks and staying in a very beautiful villa. The worldwide web. Tim Brenner Lee had this idea that we could share information through a computer and figured out how to do it with the worldwide web.

(21:31)
Mel Robbins, are any of you familiar with Mel Robbins? She's one of my favorites. She's a motivational speaker and she's got the five second rule and the high five habit. The five second rule is when you come across something that you don't want to be doing, you count down for a five and you get up and you do it. And the High five rule is a way to congratulate yourself for anything that you've done. Even if it's getting out of bed in the morning, she always says that she gets out of bed and she high-fives herself.

(22:03)
And think about it when you high five, it changes the energy of what you're doing and how you're being, whether you like her or not. R Kada has given us joy in organizing. There has been lots of people talking about organizing before her, and there'll be lots after her, but she taught us how to bring joy to the whole process. So being prepared to take skill and we need a habit of that skill. And how do we do that? Is practice. This is the best part where we get a practice, we get to learn new things, we get to experiment, we get to play, and my favorite part, we get to fail gloriously. Failure is the best part because when you fail, you learn and the next time it's better, and the next time it becomes something amazing that nobody has ever seen before.

(23:15)
Having a daily habit to master the skills so that you can interview, innovate freely and fail gloriously, not only about having a discipline of a routine and practicing the skills will level up our proficiency and grant us the freedom to experiment like I talked about before, once you've mastered all of the controls of your camera, you know how to use them. You can now break all of the rules that you learned and work on new and interesting photographs, and it gives us greater freedom in all that we do because now you're not lacking the skill to do anything. You can just keep moving forward. This is the time to learn and master. There's the old adage, when you fail, you try. Try again. This is the time. Fail and try and learn and fail. Gloriously don't fail. Small fail epically.

(24:26)
So if you don't think I know what I'm talking about, about having a habit of creativity and a habit of creating and mastering your skills, Twila Orb is one of my favorite choreographers. She walks into a white room with mirrors every day and has to create dances that will sell out theaters. She is amazing, and every day she has a ritual of routines that she follows so that she can create those dances. Even Mozart believed that practice and playing and experimenting leads to so much more. He was very dedicated and devoted to his craft and really learning how to play that piano and create music so that he could come up with something very different, original, unique and memorable. For all ages Aristotle, way back in four 30 bc, he said, excellence is a habit.

(25:37)
Albert Gregor a scientist. He believed that you had to see everything the way everybody else was seeing it, but then look at it and think about it differently. And when we did that, we could find new breaking. So if a habit is a way of behaving and a skill is something we do well, and everybody is born with creativity, and we can enhance that with practice. So creativity is your learned way of being. And by creating the rituals and habits and making those habits really ingrained in yourself as rituals, your day then becomes one ritual after another where you don't have to think about it. And there's no doubt, there's no fear, there's no procrastination, there's no decision overload. You're just allowed to create in whatever mode you need to be, whether it be your daily life, your business life, your art life.

(26:53)
So creative, daydreaming. I'm not one of those traditional meditation kind of girls. I hate sitting there with my legs crossed and my fingers in the, oh, doing the ohm, trying to clear my mind, trying to figure out whatever the meditation leader is telling me to do doesn't work for me. I like to spend my day going from ritual to ritual and letting my mind wander. I get a ponder. Whatever challenges are in my life, I get to think about memories of my life. I get to think about my art and what I want to do. What still life am I working on next? Do I have all the props? What lighting am I going to use? What background am I going to use?

(27:46)
I let my mind wander past all the stress of the day. All my to-do lists, all my everything so that I can go into this creative daydreaming and listen to all of the wonderful things my subconscious mind has to tell me because it has way better ideas than I do. I find so much inspiration in life. I find connections between thoughts. Creative daydreaming is such a powerful tool for life and for art. By creating this life of rituals, you can go past that to-do list the stress of whatever's going on in your life. You don't need to think about every moment, every decision, everything that is happening. You get to this place of unstructured flow and unexpected thoughts, and you get to see the connections between ideas, concepts, and experiences. You get to build on those and find something new and better. This open-ended thinking is also about curiosity, exploration, not judging it, not having some goal-oriented pressure on it. It just is what it is. It's just your thoughts and what you want to do with them and where they can go. It's all about possibility.

(29:26)
With your mind opened and relaxed, you get lots of spontaneous thoughts. Your subconscious can come through and you get this unintentional brainstorming, things you would never have thought. Your mind is just opened and free. You get to this place that experts call divergent thinking, and this thinking allows your mind to also face failure. And then failure does not become that scary, and you find the new possibility in the failure. You get to experiment. Your imagination can wander, and you get to be curious without having any kind of specific goals. There's no right or wrong. There's no pressure, no perfect decision. It just often leads to brand new insights for yourself. So what is doubt? Doubt is the best doubt is signaling to you that something amazing is going to happen soon.

(30:42)
You laugh, but it is doubt is just a feeling or emotion doesn't have to be good or bad. Our bodies and our minds are built for survival. We're not currently fighting a war. We're not running from animals in Africa. So your body and your mind need to find ways to keep you safe. And that's doubt. It doesn't want you to do anything different than you're doing right at this moment. But to evolve as creative individuals, we need to evolve past what we're doing right this moment. Doubt are stories that we tell ourselves, stories from our childhood, stories from experiences, stories from the world around us, but they're just stories. Doubt shows itself in many ways. Fear, lack of confidence, perfectionism being stopped because you don't have the perfect lens, the perfect lighting, the perfect backdrop.

(31:48)
Our imperfections are what make us unique, and we need to learn to embrace all of those imperfections and are perceived failures and take them to our advantage. Use them. It's as doubt as the story. Let's change the story. Let's create a new ending. Let's create some new characters in our story. And if doubt is creating blocks in your life, change those blocks into stepping stones to get you on a new path to a new and better place. By doing that, by creating rituals in your life, you can combat all of that doubt. So practical ways to overcome your doubt is you give it an name. My fear is public speaking and his name is Herbert. Herbert and I have been best friends the last couple of weeks practicing for this talk.

(32:49)
So all of my assumptions about Herbert, I have nothing to say. Nobody's going to be interested in anything I have to say. I'm going to physically forget how to speak. So going against those assumptions, well, somebody booked me for this gig so they think I've got something good to say. I'm pretty sure that I can actually get words out of my mouth in some sort of coherent matter. My desire needed to be greater than my fear. My calling in life is to be of service to others and my fear, my desire to help others be the best they can be and help them leave this world a better place for them, having been in it is greater than my fear of being here and speaking to you.

(33:50)
Progress, not perfection. Small steps. Victoria lab, Babo Labalme. In her book Risk Forward talks about taking small calculated steps to move forward, doing little things every day to move yourself past your comfort zone. So what did I do to get over my feel of fear of Herbert? I started with an outline of what I was going to talk about. Not so scary, just an outline. Once I got the outline together, I started working on the PowerPoint. That's fun. I love creating PowerPoints. Such a good time. Had my graphic designer make me some new templates. It's been great. It's been a fun, creative experience. Then I started practicing in front of friends and they all seemed to what I had to say, so I felt more confident. Change my perspective. So I'm not speaking to a group of strangers. You're all my brand new best friends, and you're just listening to some thoughts that I have. Remember, fear kills more dreams than Bill you ever will. I, has this sparked anything for you? Any thoughts about what I've said? Any ways you can practically put it into your life?

Speaker 3 (35:26):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (35:28):

Absolutely.

Speaker 3 (35:29):

One of the things that came to mind is this is like a creative outlet type of group, but these type of presentations were very prevalent in corporate, American Corporate magazine. And it apply to every

Speaker 2 (35:48):

It does, and I'm really amazed that more people in the creative world are talking about these things. Most of the people that I have researched over the last several years about creativity have been in the business world. Not very many people in the creative worlds talk about how to be creative. We talk about an F stop and an F stop and a shutter speed, and the painters all talk about technique and blending paints and what paints do you use? My friends that are sculptors are always looking for the new and exciting chisel, but nobody ever talks about how do we be creative.

Speaker 4 (36:34):

I wrote down, what would you say when you say the habits of practicing creativity, what would you define those as? Is it creating your life out of habits into rituals so that you don't have to think about all the normal everyday things? Correct. So that frees up your brain,

Speaker 2 (37:00):

Correct by creating habits and then leveling 'em up to a ritual. Then you don't have to think about everything that's happening every moment at every day. My cat stepped on my bladder, now I need to go to the bathroom and feed the cat. Yeah. One of my favorite books is Omic Habits,

Speaker 4 (37:16):

Which have you read that one? Yeah. And that's his premise as well. Yes. When you create routines for yourself, then you just do them without thinking and does allow you to not have to think about all the day-to-day stuff. So which,

Speaker 2 (37:36):

Yes. And then that allows you to lapse into the creative daydreaming where you can start listening to the subconscious and listening to all the voices in your head. And from there you can also determine which are the good voices and which are the bad voices, which are the voices of doubt that you don't want to listen to anymore, and which are the voices of creativity that are going to move you forward, make you a better person, make you more productive and efficient.

Speaker 4 (38:07):

I think it also allows you to see opportunities for creativity around you. Absolutely. You're not so busy thinking about all the stuff that you have to do or whatever, and so you're more able to see an opportunity for creativity or when someone else does something, you might just skim over that instead of like, wow, that's really amazing what they did. How could I do something similar or change it to make it my own? Absolutely. Because that's all, there's a book called the, it's something like steal, like a be or something. Steal like an artist. But you take other people's ideas that are, oh, wow, what a cool concept. And then you build on that from who you are as a person and as an artist and make it into your own style or

Speaker 2 (39:13):

Yes. And you get to see all of those nuances of things. I talked at the beginning about the lightning bolt. If you're not prepared, you're just seeing this flash of light and it's like, oh, there's something there. There's something there. What is it? Instead of when you're prepared for that lightning bolt, you see all the color and the textures and the shadows and the reflections and the sound and how it made you feel, and it gives you all of those things which give you a much deeper sense of the creativity, the art, the whatever you're going to be doing.

Speaker 4 (39:46):

There's, what's the saying? That you do something 10,000 times before you mastered it.

Speaker 2 (39:54):

Yes.

Speaker 4 (39:54):

And that's how using our canvas is. Yes. The more like if you spend 15 minutes a day using your camera, you get familiar with all the buttons and power to change things and everything. So then when you really need to get that picture, you are

Speaker 2 (40:09):

Ready. You see that bee on the flower in just the right way staring at you. You don't have to think about what is my exposure?

Speaker 3 (40:16):

Right. Didn't somebody say Your first 10,000 pictures are your worst,

Speaker 4 (40:19):

Right? Yes. And that's the big that way for all sorts of things.

Speaker 2 (40:24):

Yes.

Speaker 4 (40:25):

It's like the first 10,000 times you do something, it's just practice. Right. Because the more it becomes ingrained into you, the less you have to think about it and the more you can focus on creating the picture that you want, you're an overachiever.

Speaker 2 (40:51):

My mother was a painter, and when we cleaned out her house after she passed four years ago, we found thousands of canvases. None of us had ever seen. And to tell you the truth, most of them work very good, but we found a few in there that we had never seen before that were good, but I mean literally thousands of canvases. And she painted for probably 40 years, and it was like we just kept pulling canvases out of every closet. My sister and I got to the point that we were just laughing. We would open someplace and it's like, oh my God, there's more canvases. She had 'em under the bath towels behind things in the kitchen, just wherever she could find to store these canvases. So I felt very sad throwing most of them away, but the vast majority of 'em were not any good. But her later work hangs in my house and my sister's houses, and so many of our friends' houses because they're just amazing. But she took the time to perfect her technique and come up with some really interesting and different images, and it could just be a flower arrangement, but she had a different take on it, a different color palette, different shadowing. It was just truly amazing. But she had thousands of canvases that weren't very good.

Speaker 3 (42:08):

That's where Jess saw comes in handy.

Speaker 2 (42:10):

Yes.

Speaker 3 (42:14):

That's why digital so great. You get the results and

Speaker 2 (42:22):

Yeah. Yeah. So when my nieces and nephews are cleaning on my house, they're not going to have to go through thousands of canvases. They're just going to have to trash the hard drives. Yeah. Get rid of some hard drives. And it is, I've been going through, I have, I don't know how many hard drives and I've been going through them and pulling off the best stuff and trashing everything else. It's like, I don't need need to see all of that anymore.

Speaker 1 (42:51):

Can you see yourself grow?

Speaker 2 (42:53):

I have seen myself grow since the first picture I took in a photography class in college, which was recreating a advertisement I saw in a magazine and it was an egg. It was this beautiful egg, and the lighting was amazing. And I will never forget sticking that into the developer and watching it develop. And that one I still have and will always keep because it is such a reminder of the joy that I have from photography. Anybody else have any thoughts or sparks?

Speaker 1 (43:30):

I watched myself go through this after I got laid off. All of a sudden I went from a day of routine and get up and process and all that and get out the door, go to work, blah, blah, blah, to sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee and went, oh crap. Now. And as I go through and learn different things and take on new tasks, they're routine of something I think your brain needs. I think you have to, whether that be a workflow on when I popped the cart out of my camera, it's time to work on the pictures. I do things in a certain order.

Speaker 2 (44:05):

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (44:05):

And brain needs, I think the brain needs the order.

Speaker 2 (44:08):

It does. Our brains do order,

Speaker 1 (44:12):

But it is funny. Couldn't put your finger on 'em until somebody puts in the printer saying, this is how it worked here. It's like, yeah,

Speaker 2 (44:19):

Yeah, yeah. I do the same with my Photoshop classes. I have now designed a way that I go through the workflow and what I do first and what I do last, how I put the canvas on it so I can put it into competition and everything is done the same way and I don't have to think about it. So as I'm looking at the image on my screen, I'm seeing things that I didn't see necessarily through the camera lens. I'm seeing new possibilities of it. I'm not having to think about what do I do next?

Speaker 3 (44:55):

Retired after a 35 year career, it took me five, six years to find my case. I have talking. I have to admit, I did like you. I reintroduced myself to photography. I put it down many years.

Speaker 5 (45:15):

Yeah,

Speaker 3 (45:15):

I've been taking a picture for 50 years, but now I feel like I have to surface again. Every morning that routine that I do, and while I'm doing my routine now I'm turned down to this new thing called photography. So everything was in adventure. I walked with the guy that's whoever this club, he has vision label, but he was so interesting to talk to. But I wanted to get back to my pictures. I'm strolling along in past pace. I'm looking at the world for a different lens, literally. It was kind of disappointing. It was interesting talking to him. But I wanted to do my routine, which has been the last three months.

Speaker 5 (45:56):

Yes.

Speaker 3 (46:00):

When Andrea hit it on the bed, it's your mind needs a routine.

Speaker 2 (46:04):

Yes.

Speaker 3 (46:05):

You don't know that first. You just know it's not working. I don't feel quite right. You move some things off and you have done,

Speaker 2 (46:13):

When my dad put in his retirement papers from his company, they sent him to a class to learn how to be retired. And that was the first thing they said to them that you still need a routine. Pick a time that you're getting up. Are you having breakfast? What are you doing? I was always amazed that they sent 'em to a class to learn how to be retired.

Speaker 3 (46:39):

I think that

Speaker 4 (46:42):

Absolutely.

Speaker 1 (46:49):

Did you have any courses of study you went through? Did you obtain any recent certifications possibly that helped you with your path?

Speaker 2 (46:57):

Oh, yes. Leading question. Very leading question.

Speaker 1 (47:02):

The guy that introduced you,

Speaker 2 (47:04):

I have recently received my certified professional photographer designation from the Professional Photographers of America. Yes. It was a very big accomplishment. It is a written test and practical, and the practical looks so very deceptively easy, and it does not. And I'm now working with the professional photographers of America. I'm working on my master's in craftsmen designations as well, and Andrew and I have both recently been elected to the PPAs grant Council.

Speaker 5 (47:44):

Yeah,

Speaker 2 (47:45):

Very exciting. And if you haven't been to imaging USA, it's happening in January in Dallas, and it's truly an amazing experience between speakers and the trade show and just meeting photographers from all across the country. It's truly an amazing experience. It'll be in a place called Grapevine, Texas this year. Anything else? Any other questions, thoughts? So I am an intuitive life coach, like I mentioned, and I use my abilities as a psychic, medium tarot reader and a Reiki healer to help you overcome any blocks. If you are interested, you can contact me. I'm at elizabeth toler.com and a couple of final thoughts. By creating rituals of our day, we allow ourselves to be free to think in new and creative ways. It allows us to be less stressed, relieve decision fatigue, and focus our mental energy on more meaningful pursuits. With structure of rituals, we recreate the space for spontaneity and innovation, giving our minds the freedom to explore new ideas without being bogged down by the demands of daily choices. This mental clarity opens the door for fresh perspectives and creative breakthroughs. So thank you very much for having me.

Speaker 3 (49:18):

Thank you.

Speaker 4 (49:27):

Thank you so much. Elizabeth. Like Steve Jobs always wore a black shirt. I think about what he's going to wear.

Speaker 2 (49:37):

Michael go does the same, wears jeans in a black jacket.

Speaker 4 (49:40):

Yeah. There's a lot of people who do that. They just wear the same thing every day. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:45):

So

Speaker 4 (49:45):

You're not within those.

Speaker 2 (49:48):

Michael Kors always says he wears the same thing every day. He wants to leave the creativity for his designs.

Speaker 4 (49:54):

Very good. Yes. Well, if you guys want to talk with Elizabeth, we have plenty of time this evening before we have to be out here. So hang out, talk amongst yourselves. If you have any questions for her, you can hang out for a little bit and we'll just enjoy hanging up. Thanks so much for being here tomorrow. If you can come help, we'll come at eight or they're soon thereafter and help everything set up for everyone to start reading the prints and Thursday and Friday as well. And then Saturday, it's a full week.

Speaker 3 (50:40):

I think Thursday will now photos in the walls and pretty much be done by, we have to,

Speaker 4 (50:49):

Yes.

Speaker 3 (50:51):

Vicky just came in. Can you start over?

Speaker 5 (50:53):

Yes. Something that just finds out in, we are going to have a harvest boot and a partial of Plip for all those that they are into. Astrophotography Tography. That will be a good opportunity.

Speaker 4 (51:08):

It is Full Moon tonight at 7 36 or something.

Speaker 3 (51:13):

It's What's the partial?

Speaker 4 (51:19):

I didn't know there was a partial are here. That's what

Speaker 3 (51:23):

It says.

Speaker 4 (51:23):

Interesting.

Speaker 3 (51:26):

About what time

Speaker 4 (51:27):

Does it say What time? The partial shift this is? No, everybody look it up. You have all have phones. Go for it. But yes, it is tonight, so take advantage of those. Okay. Okay. Well, you are dismissed and thank you all for being here and.