I can recall the details as if the memories were a video recording, I remember exactly how perfect the weather was, how fantastic the assignment for the Seattle Times was.  The drinks,  sushi and the ridiculous fabulous company I shared that night.

I remember I was happy, deliriously, perfectly, giddily happy. I remember grinning up at the sky and thinking life couldn’t get better.

I had it all, the perfect job, fantastic friends and to top it off the weather was fantastic.

I remember not hearing my phone ring that night.

At seven am the next morning I heard the phone ring, I was sleepy so I let it ring.

It rang.

Then rang again.

Then rang some more.

I remember thinking this better be important.

The last sharp memory I have is of putting the phone to my ear.

I remember the tone in my mother’s voice and the sudden denial that filled my heart.

My friend Bret had died, his helicopter had gone down.

From there my memories seem more of me than from me.

I can see me fall to my knees crying, tears shaking my body till I didn’t think there was anything left in me.

Numb, was a new feeling for me.

The sparkle in me that made me so damn perky, so persistent, so passionate was gone.

See Bret was the one that knew me better than I knew myself.

From the first second I met him, Bret just got me. He saw through the facades I put up that most friends didn’t even notice. He called me on my crap, and held me to a higher standard.

He had so much faith in me.

With him gone there was suddenly a void, and that missing person was the one I needed the most.

For a long time I stumbled around life trying to get back to happy.

My laughter rang hallow, my passion wouldn’t spark, my life had lost it’s snap.

Then slowly, happy started to bloom again.

Then one day I laughed again.

Deep from the pit of my heart I laughed.

Colors regained their brilliance.

Life, as it always does, moved on.

Still, every August the colors start to fade again, I get weepy, and I lose happy.

Bret would have hated that. He would have wanted me to face pain head on and fix it.

So I am.

On August 18, I will officially open the doors of Amanda L Smith Photography. Close friends will be invited to crack open some champagne and celebrate life

Perhaps it will be the band-aid my brain needs to stop me from becoming a mess in August, who knows.

In my heart I think Bret would have been proud of me. He would have laughed with me through these last few years, and forced me to see the good side of the bad parts.

So on August 18 I will celebrate a happy life.

His and mine.

I was desperately seeking the scoop on photojournalism.

I called the Spokesman-Review (my hometown paper), The Seattle Times, The New York Times, The LA Times…. and then finally the Miami Herald.

I peppered the photographers I spoke with questions about their chosen life path.

“What are the work hours… types of stories… do you have beats… and on and on.”

All of the photographers I spoke with were kind and cordial, but most just answered my questions.

The photojournalist at the Miami Herald was different, he asked questions.

One of them stayed with me long after I had decided to give up law and be come a photojournalist.

“Are you a journalist or a artist first?”

He had told me there wasn’t a correct answer, that over the years my career and heart would tell me which came first for me.

It didn’t take too long before I thought I knew the answer, I loved capturing moments and telling stories. The light and the shapes came second to the magic in the faces.

But I was still at war the thought that I couldn’t be both an artist and a journalist.

Fast-forward ten years and the answer is as clear as the photojournalist said it would be so many years ago.

Journalist, Photo.

I am a journalist first and foremost.

I crave the story. I love asking questions, getting the subject to open up to me, letting me know their deepest and darkest secrets.

The adrenaline pumping through your veins when you know you have the scoop, that you have the story no one else has.

The story that sneaks into your heart and makes you a better person, as well as a better journalist.

My ears are still open for the scoop, my mind still searching for the angle.

It has become clear to me in the past few weeks that had it not been for my knack with the camera I would have eventually found my way into a newspaper setting as a reporter.

It is who I am, what makes me tick, and keeps me going.

Keeps me working to tell stories, find the truth, give a voice to the voiceless.

Perhaps I will rejoin my newspaper brethren as a platypus (mobile journalist who can shoot photos and video as well as reporting the story.

Or continue doing journalist through my new media outlets The Oregon State Trooper Magazine, Trooper News, CycleBuy.com/Blog etc.

Time is really the only one with the answer, so I will just sit back and enjoy the next fews years .

The nasally hello would stop the ringing of the phone.

I would instantly picture her, sitting in the oak dinner chair with the wicker bottom nestled into the corner of the dinning room. The warm light made warmer as it bounced off the yellow-wood of the cabinets in the kitchen. Her pink slippers resting on the green vintage linoleum as she listened to my stories.

Something I would say, would make a grin break out of the winkles on her skin, lighting up the eyes that glittered under her white hair.

White hair, not yellow. Grandma’s special purple shampoo that rested on the bathtub, made sure her locks stayed white. The bathroom with the dusty blue carpets where cherubs would watch over mischievous children who wanted to jump down the laundry shoot to the basement.

I loved visiting the Pepto-Bismol pink house on Dayton Ave. in Dayton, Wa.

It was the only place that ever really felt like home.

I loved the house I grew up in, but the blush pink carpets of my grandparents living-room was were I always found peace when the world would get to0 crazy.

A two-hour drive from Spokane, and I would be with the two souls I loved the most in the world. Within moments of arriving the craziness would leave my head and love would fill my soul. I knew everything was going to be all right.

My grandfather would greet me with a grin. Our faces would mush together as I hugged him tight, and his hearing aid would buzz in my ear.

He would enlist me in some sort of task or mischief he was up to. We would strip floors, create glass art, or make strange food concoctions, while grandma would read in her chair.

Every inch of that house is a part of me.

Which is why I am dreading Saturday.

Seven days from now I will go back one last time, to help empty out the memories.

I don’t want to go.

What I want to do is seal the house up like some sort of shrine to the people that created such a magical home out of it for over fifty years.

So that there is never a moment where I could forget the hours I spent in there.

But as an adult, I have to be mature about this.

I can’t hoard the memories in piece of glass and wood, I have to let some of them go.

I keep thinking about the objects that are “important”.

Grandpa’s brown coffee mug that only seems to fit in his weathered fingers?

Grandma’s pink slippers that shuffle down the hallways, with the wear marks in the soles.

Bowls that were used strictly for fruit salad?

Big white bar stools used to eat Grandma’s peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on?

Quilts that kept the cold out on the little twin beds we slept in?

A funny little witch in the kitchen with no britches on?

In dollars and cents those objects are worthless, and yet…

…and yet I can’t imagine a world without them.

Just like I am having a hard time realize a world without their owners.

“Crack.”

I let out an exhausted moan as I move into another pose, my body stiff from so many hours at the desk.

141 days.

That is how long it has been since my last blog update.

Not that I haven’t had anything to say. On the contrary, I have gobs to talk about. Volumes of stories, thoughts, opinions, and revolutions, that have just faded into the ether because I have been too busy to blog.

Trust me, I am not complaining. I love being busy. I love the rush of a looming deadline.

So let’s rewind for a bit, go over what you have missed.

I picked up a Social Media Marketing gig. I run the blog, facebook, and newsletter for the dirt-bike web company CycleBuy.com.

I know blogs, I have facebook down pat, newsletters a snap, but dirt bikes? I am a fish out of water.

I’ve had a blast learning the ends and out of the bikes and will probably find myself zooming around on one soon.

Shot a wedding…

Okay shot a lot of weddings, but one of them was in Las Vegas.

Which was a blast to shoot, SO much fun.

Getting there and back was another story.

A flight canceled on the way there forced me to fly red-eye from Portland to Atlanta, to Vegas (only 5,000 miles out of the way.)

Then United left me in Denver.

Needless to say, I was elated to see Oregon the moment I got off the plane.

The commercial side of my company took off.

Clients like Photonlight.com, RMA, and a couple local artist made me re-embrace my love of lighting kits.

I was hired as the Editor of The Oregon State Trooper Magazine.

I redesigned, created 200+ ads, wrote three stories, shot dozens of photos and published my first magazine in 6 weeks.

I’ve really never been so proud of anything in my life.

Worked for Rolling Stone. Didn’t really enjoy that experience. Long story. Nuff said.

I started freelancing for the Register-Guard again.

It has been cathartic.

I missed them. It is good to be home.

But I’ve noticed a difference in the photojournalist I was  in June 2009 and the one I am today.

I care more.

I am more invested, less distant from my subjects. I’ve lost the professional distance I used to keep from my subjects. I think it makes me a stronger journalist.

It also makes the funerals and deaths harder to cover.

I’ve photographed over 50 dogs for LCAS – most of them have found homes.

I’ve met hundreds of people, who make my “job” so much better.

My exhaustion is justified.

Just like my elation.

I am coming up on the anniversary of my layoff. If you would have asked me then, I would have told you this was never going to work. Then I would have begged for my job back.

Today is a different story. I am so proud of the company I’ve created, the life I am leading and the shrewd business woman I am becoming.

One year can change you. Change is good.

Coffee is better

reposted from my column at Idahopa.com

The hardest thing for me to deal with in my recent career change was my loss of purpose.

As a photojournalist, I felt like I was using my gift for good. I was giving a voice to the voiceless. As a wedding/commercial/gun-for-hire photographer I’ve started to feel like a sell out.

I cut and dyed my hair in a stylish coiffed do, bought new cloths, started networking, all the while my soul started to feel like it was slipping away.

I was too busy to start a personal project with the steep learning curve that comes with grasping marketing plans, quickbooks, and business plans.

The fulfillment that I had felt everytime I picked up my camera had vanished, it was just a job.

So I started thinking, who can I help now. What purpose can I give my life with only a couple of tightly scheduled hours a week.

A friend of mine was fostering dogs with Lane County Animal Shelter, and she showed me the sad photos they had available. The likelihood of a dog being adopted with a great photo is so much greater, and although LCAS is a no-kill shelter, when they run out of room some of the “un-adoptable” dogs that have been at the shelter for months are put down.

Suddenly I had something I could give, a voice to the voiceless. I could give a “death-row” dog the best chance at finding a forever home.

At the Post Register in Idaho Falls I had covered “Pet of the Weeks,” and dreaded every moment. Now I get excited when I drop by for an hour once a week.

Quickbooks, social media marketing, business plans, and networking are important. But more important is your mental well-being during the transition journalism to owning your own business.

If you feel lost, look out in the community and see who is needing help. Is there a boys and girls club that could use photo lessons? Impoverished families who need family photos? Puppies that need saving?

Even without a paper or time for a story there are still ways to help and contribute to your communities. It just takes a tidge of creativity to find your voice 

beer and light.

All kidding aside, you really can’t have bad beer or bad light, because when it comes down to it you still have beer and light.

Bad light can make a photographer’s life difficult. Make them have to work harder to nail the perfect frame. However, when all is said and done the picture  is perfect and the photograher is prouder of it because of the sweat and tears behind it.

A bad beer is annoying. Funk in the line or musty or spunky tastes can ruin the joy that can be found in a sip of the perfect beer after a long day. Than again, drink enough of the “bad beer” and you won’t care that the taste is a tidge off .

Luckily on my recent beer tour of Portland neither bad light or bad beer was a problem I encountered.

Instead I had a delightful day playing with shoots of sunlight that danced across the glasses on our tour. Sunbeams can be problematic when shooting over-all shots of rooms if you don’t learn to work with the light instead of against it you will encounter huge problems.

If you meter for the sunbeam and position the subject in the beam or with the beam reflecting on their face then you can also clean up the background of your photos by letting them fall away into the darkness.

Also using the light to “blow-out” a background can cleanup a messy backdrop by making it all go white

The best thing to do with light it allow it to impress you, you don’t need to impress upon it. Let the light tell you what it wants and you will never have to deal with “bad-light” again.

As for the beer… you are on your own

My grandmother’s recipe for rolls.

I carefully filled my kitchen aid with the necessary ingredients. Yeast, flour, sugar combined under a churning metal arm and my mind started to slip back to a time where I stood shorter at the kitchen counter.

I remember her aged hands, translucent skin over delicate bones pulling the heavy dough from the bowl. Pulling the rolling pin back and forth flattening the form to exactly the perfect thickness to sink the cookie cutters into

Every holiday my mother or grandmother would make our rolls, creamy and gooey on the inside and crispy and buttery on the outside. The smell of rising rolls would fill every corner of the house, and the delectable scent that came when the rolls were finished pulled the family to the table like a hook in our noses.

For Thanksgiving this year I pulled out my tattered recipe card and slowly put the dough together.

Each scoop of flour, scrunch of dough between fingers and view of the carefully covered rows of rising rolls took me home to my grandmother’s kitchen.

400 miles, dozens of years between the little girl in the kitchen with her grandmother and the woman alone with her Kitchen-aid, but as the smell waifed up to my nose I was suddenly a child in her kitchen again.

I was home.

It is amazing to me that there are scent, songs, and textures that pull us from the present moment into a memory. Eyes closed and heart opened I stopped in that memory taking in the warmth and love in that room with grandma.

Grinning, I opened my eyes and finished the rolls.

I’m Portland

She’s water.

I’m fire.

She’s introspective and thoughtful.

I’m explosive and spontaneous.

She’s short with dark hair.

I am tall with light hair.

She hates new things.

I seek out the new and strange.

 We couldn’t be more different.

Exact opposites.

My sister, my first friend, and my favorite travel companion.

So when Laura told me that she would be down for a business trip, I was elated.

A full day with my baby sister, in the town I love.

There would be plenty of things to see and do, but I had to take her to Voo Doo Doughnuts.

I had first heard of VD when I was watching Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservation. You can see it here.

She just had to have a maple bar with bacon on it.

She didn’t have to say anything. I knew this wasn’t a “Laura thing.”

But as we stood in the extremely long summer long, chit-chatting, it felt like we were still kids.

Our extreme differences faded away, and we were just giggly sisters. Our inside jokes, sideways glances, the things that are so glaringly similar in us made the the time fly by.

Her eyes were wide and unsure when we stepped into the tiny store with pepto bismol walls and crazy doughnuts. 

Laura asked me, “will you hate me if I just get a maple bar?”

I grinned. So Laura. I bought three, all crazy, including the Bacon Maple bar. I knew she would sample just about anything… and she had to try that maple bar. 

We walked down the street to the waterfront and broke open the bag.

She took the maple bar out. Stared at it. Trying to figure it out. Decide which way to eat it, which position she could put her mouth to taste the least amount of bacon.

Needless to say, she didn’t really like it

Her faces and the time it took her to try it had us tied up in giggles the whole afternoon. Long after the doughnuts had been devoured.

I will admit, I could finish the whole bacon maple bar ~ as good as it was… it was just so rich and yummy my belly just could take it all.

I grinned out the windows of my car, relishing the feeling of the sunset in my heart. I turned my head up to look out the sunroof as Mary Chapin Carpenter struck her first cord from my iPod.

“Saw my life this morning, lying at the bottom of a drawer… and whatever I believed in, this is all I have to show…”

Then and there I broke down.

As the tears streamed down my face, I realized I had been lying to everyone; especially to myself. I am not okay. 

On June 8, at 10:05 a.m. I lost my family, my passion, and the part of me I loved the most.

A newsroom was never an office for me; it was always home.

The reporters, editors and photographers were family.

I always had plenty of “fathers/mothers” with sympathetic ears, scolding voices, and a path to follow.

A bother, with mocking tones and supportive stories.

Sisters to bond with, to grow with.

I am desperately homesick.

I don’t fit in this new life of mine, yet. I feel as lost as a freshmen in a dorm-room, calling mom to feel a semblance of home.

Like a freshman, I am searching. 

“I saw you this morning, you were staring back at me, from an ancient photograph, stuck between some letters and some keys.”

84 days ago, I knew who I was. I could define my dreams, my hopes, I knew the girl in the mirror and loved her.

She used the gifts she had been given to make a difference, to give a voice to the voiceless.

I ache to be back at a paper. I would give anything to shoot the “shitty” assignments, I complained about less than a year ago.

I am too scared to go back to another paper. Because I wonder, “could I stand losing this part of me one more time?”

“I’m not running, I’m not reaching. I’m just resting in the arms of the great wide open, gonna pull my soul in and I’m almost home.”

Am I running? Am I not reaching? Am I ever going to be “home again?” Am I ever going to feel my heart and soul be in this new life?

Am I being a spoiled little girl to complain when she is starting, what looks like, a successful business, with amazing clients, and fun shoots?

Deep down I know I am growing-up, becoming self-reliant.

Cutting off the pigtails, shucking the overalls, finding her older sister’s stash of makeup and transforming into a woman.

For the first time I am standing on my own, and deep down, I know it will make me stronger.

“There is no such thing as no regrets, and baby it’s alright.”

I am struggling. There is no other way to put it. But I have no regrets, and I know it will be alright.

I am learning new things, finding new talents, greater strengths.

But every once in awhile I get “lost for a moment in the ache of old goodbyes,” I find myself missing Dan Pelle’s voice or Paul Carters tips before an assignment. I start to feel I am betraying my stories, like Reagan Hailey and Craig Tanner, by not pounding the pavement for the paper everyday.

Homesickness will pass in time, but for now I am cluttering my desk with coffee stained papers, smudging ink on my face and eating cup o’ noodles until it does.

The high school students around me buzzed with excitement over acceptance letters. Stanford, Harvard, Berkley. 

I was going to Spokane Falls Community College.

That was unheard of in my Advance Placement english class. 

To forgo the respected college institutions and go to a community college was… well… not done.

“Why are you even in this class if you are just going to waste it there,” I was asked over and over.

I knew who I was, I knew what I wanted, and I felt that I would find it at SFCC. SFCC had one of the best photography programs in the country.

And since I was going to be a war photojournalist, the best photo program was where I should be.

Regardless of my internal convictions, I still hated sitting in that cold metal seat listening to the other students.

It was the last few weeks of school and we all had senioridice. High School learning was over, we were all more than ready for our new lives.

With extreme effort, Mrs. Lake silenced the class.

She had put together a week of assignments for us. We would be analyzing, but not the works of high literary merit like we had earlier in the year, instead we would be analyzing ourselves.

She had a list of assignments, all requiring “deep” (as deep as an 18-year-old can be) introspection. One of the assignments asked for us to come up with 10 rules for a happy and successful life.

That night while working my extremely slow shift in the housewares department at Sears my list of ten rule became twenty. Twenty became the sixty which lead to the final 107 rules.

Some are funny, some poignant but all of them say something about the girl I was that day in English class, and the woman I would become.

Fast forward seven years, here I sit on a cushy leather chair with a solid wood desk wrapped around me retyping those rules. Three of my closest friends have babies, and many of my friends are starting off new journeys, so I am offering up my rules for the first time. Feel free to laugh or disagree, and please add your own as I send them one by one out via twitter. www.twitter.com/alsmithphoto

Here is the #1

1) See the world for what it truly is… not what you believe it should be.