Category: photography

  • A Pivot

    Well, Christmas didn’t exactly go as planned.

    We planned to travel to go see family in Kansas City and Nebraska for the next ten days.

    Yesterday, we made it as far as Oneonta, Alabama before we decided we should stop at an urgent care for Covid, flu, and strep for Porter because he had a sore throat and no one we were going to visit needed to be exposed to sickness.

    Sure enough, Porter has strep. So, back home we went. Interesting 5 hour drive at least. And I’m glad we found out before we made it all the way to Memphis, which had been our original plan for seeking out an urgent care. The drive back from Alabama was much shorter than the original idea.

    Still, Christmas plans being thwarted is rarely the end of the world.

    Today we slept in and Jared and I went to Costco and Trader Joe’s for goodies. And boy, we did come home with goodies.

    And then tonight, after a predictable meltdown, I returned to creative brainstorming. Because: the gear puzzles in my brain will not stop turning. My brain naturally turns to creative problem-solving when left to its own devices, and my photography gear has been a problem for the last six months.

    When I sold off the second Fuji GFX 50sII and several lenses, and purchased the Fuji X-S20 and started contemplating moving more seriously back to the X series ecosystem, I hit a major creative wall when the first attempt to adapt the Cinelux 37.5mm lens to the X-S20 failed.

    It’s a technicality: When I originally cobbled together the adapter, I could not find a M65 to X Series adapter. I had no idea there was actually a company making them.

    So instead, I bought a M65 to M42 step down lens filter ring, and an M42 to FX adapter.

    And, I proceeded to have a massive meltdown when the lens wouldn’t focus on the X-S20 because the focal point was closer to the sensor than my lens could get. And I gave up, assuming the 37.5mm would only work on the GFX forever.

    However: there is a company making these adapters, and I have one on the way now.

    Which means, my dream of making my GFX be an exclusively monochrome camera while the X-S20 is the color version, shooting Cinelux lenses simultaneously……well, that dream is alive again.

    In my brainstorming, I have also realized exactly how stunted my creativity has been most of the late summer and Fall.

    And I know why that is, and I take it as a very good sign that my creativity is returning. Even if it is only taking the form of creative problem solving thus far, it makes me extremely happy to realize that maybe I am making substantive progress to leaving the past in the past.

    Even if the meltdowns have not completely stopped just yet. The meltdowns may never stop completely; it occurred to me that they may actually be a symptom of the PTSD. But today, I recovered enough to get excited about my art again and that is enough.

  • caroline price luxe

    I did a thing. 

    And all of a sudden, very easily, there is a photography business, complete with LLC and business license, and insurance, and all the things, all over again. 

    I paid for and picked up my occupational tax certificate on a trauma anniversary, and for most of the day, I was busy, occupied, and proud of myself. 

    Night comes, bedtime comes, and doubt creeps in. 

    It’s a sign that it is bedtime. 

    Caroline Price Luxe didn’t happen overnight. But, it did happen in less than ten days. It took less than 24 hours to have my occupational tax certificate in hand, actually. The city of Carrollton likes to facilitate the establishment of new businesses. 

    And Gemini helped me re-vamp my logo using my chosen blog colors and my chosen font (well, Gemini picked the sage in my blog colors too, when I provided the precise shade of pink I use, but that’s another story).

    And I haven’t forgotten for a single second what I was doing this time last year. And I wrote a Facebook post about it, but I’m not going to dwell here.

    Tonight I’m going to bed content that if I want to accept fees for a session I can, and the parameters for sessions are that my beloved Cinelux lenses be used. My Cinelux lenses are the gold standard for cinematic, timeless photography. Photographs made with these lenses look straight out of a movie because quite literally, these are large format movie projection lenses. 

    And tomorrow, I’m going to make a renewed commitment to attempting to live in the present. 

    After all, that’s all we really have. 

    The photo below is representative of what the best of the Cinelux lenses can do. It’s the photo I chose to announce the new venture on Instagram. Kaitlyn and Jonathan were so kind to model for me.

    In the coming weeks and months, there will be more model calls. The very nature of Caroline Price Luxe means that a brand new portfolio has to be built from scratch. If you are interested in participating, please inquire. 

    I’m ready. 

  • changes

    I’ve been quiet since Friday. 

    I’ve been introspective. And depressed. And busy.  

    We went to pick Porter up yesterday in Athens. Today, Jared and I cleaned house all day long to prepare for tonight. Our house is not embarrassing finally, if we have guests.  

    Tonight, we decorated for Christmas. My Rich’s Richie Bear and Priscilla Pig stuffed animals came out for the decorations for the first time in our married lives since Porter was an infant and too tiny to hurt them.  

    We got Nannie’s ceramic tree decorated. I pulled out my Rudolph collection of stuffed animals and Jared’s sweet Mama’s Christmas woodcarvings and stockings.  

    We ate dinner, the five of us having Jared’s famous grilled cheese sandwiches, and then we had an outing for milkshakes at Chick-fil-a because it is peppermint milkshake season.. Except for Oliver, who doesn’t like sweets, so he had an eight count nugget because two grilled cheese sandwiches were not enough for an 11-year-old boy.  

    And somewhere over the past week, I remembered that I missed taking pictures for other people and I’d like to be able to do it again. I really enjoyed the maternity session with the Cinelux lenses. 

    And so, things are in the works. A new page is on this site. There is a new domain name also pointing to that page and a new instagram site that has been held for about a year or more, waiting for something to do.  

    And yes, a new LLC has been filed for, waiting for approval. Business expenses will be kept to an absolute minimum, no new equipment is required.

    The idea is a completely artistic-driven portrait experience. One that I don’t pay to support, fees that support a living wage. Portraits will be made exclusively with my existing Cinelux and Minolta lenses, with my GFX50sII.

    I may never get a client and that’s okay, but I’m going to create the kind of art that feeds me. I have a clear artistic voice waiting to scream out in my head and it’s high time that I fed that vision.

    It’s time.

  • I love cinelux lenses!

    I did a very brief maternity session yesterday. As predictable, I am hopeless with poses, so I looked at my phone constantly. Here is what I came up with though:

    Jared says I will grow to resent being the free photographer around these parts. What I know is that I came home way not stressed at all about how these turned out, so when they turned out well I was just thrilled.

    It does beg the question though: can I really do sessions with only Schneider-Kreuznach Cinelux projection lenses on my GFX 50sII?

    Whatever the case, right now I do not regret selling the lenses I sold and I am very happy with my kit.

    And it felt good to spend all of about 15-20 minutes doing a session and come up with these as the result.

    Thanks so much to Kaitlyn and Jonathan for playing along with my experiment.

    This session just makes me want to book more sessions. Reach out if you’re interested in something like this!

    You can read more about me here.

  • laundry day is probably going to be four days long

    The title says it all.

    On Sunday evening, October 19, I threw in a load of laundry. I knew I’d be busy on dedicated laundry day, Monday the 20th, so I was trying to get ahead so my whole routine wouldn’t be blown to smithereens.

    I was fooling myself. Not because the premise of the idea wasn’t good, but because Monday the 20th threw me into a whirlwind of emotions I can only tangentially talk about at the moment. Mostly self-destructive despair and self-loathing.

    I think I actually did a load of laundry on the 20th, or I actually switched the laundry, early that morning.

    And, maybe three loads of laundry have gotten done since then. Maybe four.

    Monday is still laundry day. But, I am starting laundry day today, on Saturday, so that maybe laundry day will be done by Tuesday or early Wednesday– we have that much laundry. If I finish it on Monday, all the better but I am not holding my breath.

    Dana K. White from A Slob Comes Clean was the first person who I listened to about laundry day. My aunt said years ago she tried to tell me once it would be easier to just have a laundry day when the boys were little, but I have no memory of that.

    But, Dana says that a first laundry day, in no way, is likely to be only one day if you have an actual family you are doing laundry for.

    And in my experience, she’s 100% right.

    So, here I am, it’s 12:46 PM on Saturday November 8, 2025, and I am started Monday’s the 10th’s laundry day at 11:30 this morning.

    Because I was doing pretty good before the 20th. And I feel pretty good this morning, aside from feeling like my routine is gone to crap.

    And, this afternoon, there is a maternity session and it is exclusively a Cinelux lens maternity session. I am taking along the Minolta lens just in case I need it, but I don’t anticipate needing it. A former bride approached me about maternity photos several months ago, about the time I was shutting down the business and sold the bulk of my lenses, and I turned them down. But I reached out later and showed her some of the photos with the lenses and told her it wouldn’t be a typical session but that I was willing to do it for free if I could use these lenses and use them for my portfolio, and she agreed. So here we are, and it is a beautiful day with perfect weather, and I get to have a Cinelux session.

    The idea was that if the photos turned out, I might decide to take on limited Cinelux sessions in the future.

    I already used this lens once in a session, a few years ago now. I just chickened out and got complacent with my autofocus lenses.

    I forgot to slow down and enjoy photography.

    And, for the occasion, I downloaded again the UnScripted app, my posing Bible I used for so very long. I am very excited about the poses I found.

    Eight years in, I no longer feel any shame whatsoever in the fact that coming up with natural poses on my own is no, in fact, natural for me.

    But, I found the UnScripted app when it was first barely out of beta, brand new, years ago and it has served me very well. I paid for a lifetime membership around 2020 in fact, when it was dirt cheap– definitely not what it is now. It was probably 1/5 of what it is now — at $499– or else I wouldn’t have paid for it at all.

    Looking back on this week: there were nerves about the potential health scare. There was leftover fallout from meeting with someone I shouldn’t have on October 20. There was fallout from having told that person exactly what I think of them in writing since apparently I am incapable of doing so to their face though at least I can, indeed, face them. But, also: the time change hit me really, really hard, really, really suddenly.

    I do not do well with limited daylight hours. Which is why I use a light therapy lamp to begin with.