I recently had the pleasure of taking some portraits of my friend Bret Henry at his shop Honest Coffee.
I hope you enjoy looking at these as much as I enjoyed taking them.
Austin Lord Photography
Stephen
The Value of Contentment
While the path of the creative journey will never be predictable, the feelings that come from it certainly can be. In the two years that I have been a full time freelancer, I have gone through the emotional cycle that ranges from the excitement one can find on Christmas morning to what can seem to be the same feelings of loneliness and confusion that Tom Hanks went through in Cast Away at least a baker’s dozen times. As a matter of fact, one time I had a shoot that went so badly I almost went home and knocked my tooth out with an ice skate. I kid.
Recently my life has been looking like this — I will get swamped with work all at once after things have been quiet for a little while. I will tell myself that I have finally “made” it, and I need to get an agent, an assistant, a business manager, and a retoucher or else I will not be able to keep up with all of this work that I am getting now. I manage to take care of all the work on my own in a couple of weeks and then things get quiet again. Disappoint kicks in because my inbox is back to being mainly emails from J. Crew or my mom sending me my updated dental insurance info.
In all of this I’ve learned that if you want to make it through life with your soul in one piece, you need to learn how to be content in any part of the journey.
I think contentment can be found in any circumstance by recognizing that every step has value even if life doesn’t look exactly how I want it to. All too often I get upset when I don’t have anything going on for a week or two, but it wasn’t until recently that I started recognizing how important those slow times are because they allow me to rest. It’s in these times of rest that I find I get the most inspiration to create the images that take my work to the next level. Boom. Value found.
What I’m learning is that every step I take means something if I let it mean something.
C. Garrow
These photos symbolize the beginning of a shift in my work that I am so excited about.
Judah and the Lion
Last week I had the honor of photographing Judah and the Lion before they left for their Folk Hop N Roll tour. These are some of the most fun guys you will ever meet, and I wanted to make sure that came through in the photos. Being around them feels a bit like being around a family so I wanted the photos to subtly show that aspect.
A couple of days after our shoot, I joined a couple thousand other people to go see them play a sold out show at the War Memorial here in Nashville. If they are touring to a city you live in, I highly recommend going to see them even if it’s for no other reason than to experience their cover of “Booty Wurk.”
Fleurie Pt. II
This is the second round of images from my shoot with Fleurie. I told Lauren upon preparing for this shoot that listening to her music always makes feel like I'm pulling an all-nighter, and I wanted to capture that feeling in the portraits I took of her. When she told me that most of her writing happens in the middle of the night, I realized why I felt that way about her music.
With the first set of images I posted, I was visualizing what I saw when listening her EP "Arrows." However, with these shots I was thinking about my personal favorite song of hers which is a tune called "Paralyzed." I think all it will take is for you to listen to it to understand why I shot these the way I did.
New York | Kate
One of my first tests while living in New York city with Kate Zuboc of Muse Models.
Gracie
Sugar and the Hi Lows at the Ryman Auditorium
Last week I had the opportunity to photograph Sugar and the Hi Lows at the Ryman in Nashville as they opened up for Kacey Musgraves. It was such an awesome time getting to document the whole evening both before and after the show.
M.E.
Kaitlin
Brandi Cyrus
This past week I finally had the chance to hang out with Brandi and shoot some photos of her for her style blog. We did some exploring in one of my favorites neighborhoods of downtown Nashville and ended up getting some shots I was pretty stoked on.
Check out her blog at stylenative.com.