In the Spring, I assisted at what was to be the last After Dark Education. I’ve written before about what an amazing event, non-conference, learning exploration, and I’m sure I’ll write more about it later. It has proven to be more powerful to my inspiration than I could have ever hoped.
The last night of AD, we all stayed up late (most of us slept little the whole time–it IS “After Dark”, after all!) and planned to get up late. Maybe about the time to check out–that was my plan. I never sleep in, nor do I typically stay up until the wee hours of the morn. Alas, it was not meant to be this time, as a tornado warning engulfed the sleeping city of St. Louis around 5 AM on my sleeping in day. There’s nothing like a siren going off when you’ve slept an hour or two.
Hundreds of us trudged down into the basement of the hotel and were sent back up maybe 45 minutes later when someone determined all was safe. Although I did attempt to go back to sleep, my roommates were planning to drive home INTO the storm, so the weather channel droned on. I had planned to do a shoot before I left that morning, but I was unbelievably exhausted and was afraid that I might not make it home with a 6 hour drive if I waited too long. So I packed everything and loaded it into my car. Everything except my Pelican case with my equipment.
And it started pouring again. Not just raining. More like a monsoon. Rain pelted down so hard I knew it wasn’t safe to drive, so I looked for a place to shoot. My original plan pre-storm was to go into this really cool attic room and use a sheet as a flowing gown. The room was locked up, and I was too brain dead to remember to borrow my sheet from my room.
Exhaustion overwhelmed me, but I HAD to shoot something all on my own in this amazing historic hotel. I sat on my trusty old Pelican case and stared out at the rain through lovely 6+’ tall windows. And then it hit me. What if there WAS a monsoon and the hotel filled with water? What if the window through which I looked became my escape hatch?
And so, “After the Storm” developed. I will tell you that standing on a Pelican case (which has wheels) is not the brightest thing if you are using your self timer and running back and forth from your camera and hopping onto the case in the 10 second time frame I had. I fell off the case so hard that I thought perhaps I had broken a wrist and lay stunned on the floor hoping I didn’t upchuck my breakfast. (No broken bones, no vomiting ensued). My eldest daughter did ask me if I forgot how old I was when I told the wipe-out tale. Wait, what? I’m not 25?
This photo is a composite made up a a few images of me in varying poses. Blacking out the furniture in the room added to a more stark feeling, and I added bubbles and the reflection (obviously) in post production as well. This is one of those photos where I really had to experiment to get the photo the way I wanted, and did lots of “how to” videos and tutorials. Best of all, it was a grand end to my After Dark experience.