Visions of Veronica at the Peace Garden!

What’s up, Hive? Just pulled up a chair at @caffetto, killing some time while @guthrie sees The Odyssey with friends on his birthday! I’ve got some time to breathe and increasingly, more time to breathe. It’s nice to not feel like there’s an anvil on my chest for a change. I always mention that the two litmus tests for me are how often I shave and how frequently I’m posting on Hive. If both of those things are regular habits, I’m usually in pretty good shape. I had a therapy session yesterday and was pleased to discuss how good things have been going lately. There’s a lot to be thankful for.

I’m sort of in the throes of a glorious ADHD renaissance at the moment. Everything is fun, new and exciting. I’m deep in mushroom cultivation in my basement; it’s a laboratory with neoprene gloves, syringes and an entire still air box. I’m growing morels, coryceps, reishi, pink oyster and Lion’s mane mushrooms. Setting the foundation for a regular production of culinary and medicinal mushrooms through the fall and winter into next year. I’m obsessed with vintage CRT TV’s, mostly small ones, from the 1960’s. They’ll be used in the Minnesota documentary I’m working on with my friend Christine focusing on the free Palestine movement. I’ve been finishing little projects like restoring my 1927 Brunswick phonograph.

Okay, with all the therapy housekeeping about how life is going, I wanted to share some new edits from a shoot from a few years ago. There was a model here in Minnesota named Veronica that booked a session and I had to come up with a fitting location as the backdrop to our shoot. Years earlier I’d done a senior picture shoot at the Peace Garden in South Minneapolis and I thought that might offer enough shade for what was a midsummer day that didn’t see the sun go down till almost 9:00p.m. That was where we met and within 20 minutes or so, we were walking through what seemed like a scene out of Pan’s Labyrinth.

This was my first shoot in a few months. I’d finished my annual trip to Viva Las Vegas that spring and took some time off. I remember feeling like I had to shake off some rust but Veronica was such an engaging model her interaction with the camera made it easy. I was able to bypass the typical photography spots […this place is festering with senior picture and wedding photographers all year long] and find more secluded gems as we moved throughout the park. This was a stand out shoot at a time I was going through a creative low so it’s nice to come back to it now and finish a few new edits. Thanks for reading!