彩民宝典

Is this possible day in and day out? Some days it鈥檚 easier than others. A big part of the job is staying inspired.

To do my best work, I鈥檝e realized it鈥檚 critical to look outside of the j.o.b. Fifteen years into my career, I began to feel drained and started to seriously doubt my own creative abilities. I contemplated several remedies, some more extreme than others. The demands of the job were relentless, but I had to get my creative mojo back.

Inklings and insights can come from anywhere. Creatives need regular infusions of those. Sustained inspiration is something different. The experience that comes from regularly engaging in creative or artistic pursuits resonates. It changes you.

It turns out my struggle at the agency was the genesis of an entirely new creative obsession: making art and sharing it in galleries.

For the last decade, I鈥檝e relied heavily on extracurricular creative pursuits for inspiration. The result has been wide-ranging art shows: Untotaled鈥攕culptural photography that involved crushing cars; Zoom鈥攊mpressionistic, painterly photography of the natural world; and Eternal鈥攁n evocative shoot in an Indiana-Jones-like site in India.

These projects aren鈥檛 linked by common themes. I鈥檝e been asked if I鈥檓 drawn to ideas because they鈥檙e complicated or if I鈥檓 just determined to make them that way. My goal, like nearly every other creator, is to make unique things. That often creates complexity. For me, creative growth is the prime motivator.

I traveled to many points in Indonesia, but the greatest opportunity for me to create material for a new show came in Amed, Bali. I went there to work with impressive athlete-models who practice freediving. Some refer to themselves as mermaids. I knew if I could pull it off, the resulting work had the potential to be empowering and beautiful.

I aspired to capture their grace and power, soaring in an infinite liquid world. I wanted to play with the perception of gravity and space.

For most of us, freediving is just plain crazy. The goal is to push to go deeper and deeper into the dark, cold water on a single breath of air. The most important thing, I鈥檓 told, is to relax and 鈥渞esist the urge to breathe.鈥� I鈥檒l bet most humans would agree, being more than 100 feet underwater and wanting a breath you cannot yet take is about the scariest thing imaginable.

I was to be on scuba, but I had no experience directing models underwater. It鈥檚 difficult and potentially dangerous. There were too many variables for me to anticipate, let alone control in a production like this, like the magnitude 7 earthquake that rocked the island in the middle of the shoot.

We shot for three days in stunning Jemeluk Bay. Sharing the images daily with the models proved essential. Their enthusiasm grew as did their awareness of how they looked through my camera. We dialed in the plan on land and again on the surface, but the models were great improvisers, taking turns diving down to my location and beyond, surprising me time and again with their creativity, athletic prowess and control.

The second evening, we were together reviewing images when the building began to shake. Hundreds of people died 50 miles away, and Amed suffered some damage. While our group wasn鈥檛 harmed, we felt our nerves kick in as the aftershocks continued for days. A crazy energy took over the project as we created some of our best images of the shoot.

I took more than 10,000 photos during my six weeks in Indonesia. Simply being there was rejuvenating and inspiring鈥攂ut for me, the full-on act of planning, connecting, coordinating, adapting and creating feeds my soul and makes me who I am.

Days after landing in the United States, I returned to Boulder for fall classes. It was definitely my most fulfilling semester to date.