I’ve been pushing myself in these slower months to get creative and create more of my fine art work. Even if it’s not a fully defined idea when I start – I think it’s good to push my boundaries a little and try new things. So today I’m sharing another in my self-portrait series that I’m calling The Journey. The series that is visually displaying the emotions and things that have happened along our road of infertility like hope, strength, anger, sorrow, etc… The many moments that comprise the whole. You can take a peek at all my fine art work features here.

I had this idea for a “Leap of Faith” image in my head for a long time. The main limitation being that I needed a cliff face to be able to create the image, and there aren’t really an abundance of those around here. So when I saw that the water in the lake had receded and created these interesting walls of dirt – I thought it’d be worth a try to find a way down there to try and photograph them and see if they would work. It took me a while to get down to the bottom since I had to hike off the beaten trail and find a safe way down with all my gear. But I eventually managed it. Then was the fun of walking along the “beach” to try and find the best angles for what I was hoping to capture. Even after shooting I wasn’t sure if I really got what I had in mind, but I could at least try to make something fun with this.

While this image isn’t exactly what I had in mind for the final product I still like it. It’s not really my “leap of faith” idea since leaping wasn’t a part of this shot. For me, this is more of that feeling of being on the verge… It might be physically – your muscles or brain power are completely spent. It might be that feeling when you’re on the verge of tears… that feeling of them bubbling up and at risk of welling over. Or it could be that feeling of being on the edge of greatness, whether that’s great success or failure. There’s this feeling that comes with coming to the edge of your limits… and that’s what I was trying to convey here.

This was also one of the trickiest composite pieces I have done so far. Because of the difficulty and my lack of certainty as to whether or not the piece would work, I didn’t do a timelapse this time. I did still walk through layer by layer how I built the final piece. But doing a timelapse of the editing process would have been tedious since there was a lot of fine-tuned detail work for the creation of this piece. In fact there’s at least seven different images involved in creating this image which makes it kind of unique and cool. You can check out the video below.

And here’s the completed piece

Even though this piece didn’t turn out precisely as I expected – I’m still really happy with it. It was challenging and got me to try some new things. As always, I love hearing what you think – so please share your thoughts and experiences in the comments! And I’ll try and create another image to share with you guys real soon!