I posted the following on Facebook and Instagram last night:
“It’s time.
I set the groundwork for a new portrait photography business last December, and I’ve sat on it since then for a variety of reasons.
I’ve missed being out with my camera.
So, it’s time.
Sessions with me will be slow. I’m working in monochrome for now. I’ll be limiting the number of sessions I accept, and I promise you’ll love the results.
Just me, my camera, a single lens, lots of fun, and beautiful portraits as the result.
Custom sessions beginning at $50. Reach out today to schedule your session.
Hi World. This is Caroline Price Luxe.”
I’m looking forward to being out with clients again.
For Christmas, Jared gave me some spending money, with the only condition that I buy things that would bring me joy.
One of the thing I bought was the Schneider-Kreuznach Min/Mag pictured here. I bought it thinking it would adapt to either my Cinelux 85mm or my Cinelux 37.5mm, both ways, making it a useful tool.
And when it arrived, I was crestfallen to realize that the 85mm filter threads were dented.
But, not to be deterred, I ordered a Neewer lens vise. So when the lens vise arrived, I went at it, determined to be able to screw on the Min/Mag.
And, I got the lens filters successfully re-shaped, and went at screwing on the Min/Mag on the Mag side.
There were tears. I was soooooo upset. There were more tears. There was anger, because then I saw that Jared had the 85mm lens itself taken apart.
Turns out, the dented part was a lens hood for the 85mm, with the logo on it. a lens hood that is every bit the material of the rest of the structure of the lens barrel, meaning there is no cutting it off the Min/Mag.
And then, Christmas faded, and the Min/Mag with its problems, resigned, went into the dehumidifier cabinet.
And then comes this past week, with the job falling through, and I resorted to what I always want to do when these things happen: I started daydreaming about camera and lens gear.
But today, I had a renewed resolve. The Min/Mag went into the freezer for 30 minute with a dehumidifier pack, in two baggies.
No dice– that lens hood is not coming off.
But then, I remembered the screw. And I wondered: what would it look like if I used the glass from the Min side on the lenses?
The Min side has its own version of a lens hood, since the glass is on the lens side of the barrel.
The Super Cinelux 37.5mm is a no-go. Doesn’t work– has enough vignetting from the barrel that it isn’t worth the wide angle.
The 85mm though? I gasped when I saw what it could do:
The Min on the 85mm acts as a focal reducer and slight wide-angle teleconverter, giving me absolutely 99% of what the 85mm could do on the GFX 50sII. It gives me back the 60-70mm perspective that the 85mm had on the GFX.
Would I like the Min/Mag to be completely functional? Of course. I was convinced that it was the Mag side that I would want the most.
But I am thrilled to have stumbled on this serendipitous turn of gear events.
It feels like Christmas all over again today, and literally all it cost me was going out to the garage to get one of Jared’s electronics screwdrivers.
The setup looks ridiculous, admittedly, for a 60-70mm equivalent setup on the X-S20, but I care not. one. bit:
So super excited. I’d given up working with the Cinelux line since Christmas in the fallout of all this, along with the sale of the GFX itself, but now I am thrilled I can have 99% of the GFX look with not spending another single dime on gear.
Detail of a 2011 Blogger template by Skincorner, featuring artwork by Amai, from the header of my blog at the time.
“I’m determined to salvage the comfortingly wonderful customs from my heritage while, for lack of a better term, “taking out the trash,” so to speak. Example: Karo syrup makes a really good, easy topping for breads when mashed up with butter on a fork. Fantastic taste to that. However, eat too much of it, and I know I’ll have a heart attack. It’s all in the moderation. I have bipolar disorder and PTSD and I struggle with massive doses of anxiety. Generally, though, I am a pretty happy person. Except when I’m not. :) It’s pretty much just like that. And then I feel like the world is caving in. But the good news for you is that if you know me, unless you spend a lot of time and I really let you in, you won’t have to deal with any of it. Because I put on a really good cover and generally don’t let many people close. I’m slow to trust people right now. Otherwise, I’m mommy to two really funny little boys. They keep Jared and me really busy. My living room is overrun with matchbox cars and little boy-sized desks and chairs.”
This was the “about” box on my very first blog.
I finally got up the courage to go scouting through archive.org to look at old blog posts that are now defunct. I pulled this “about” quote from my blog as it was on February 3, 2011.
And I can unpack quite a lot that goes unsaid between the lines now, 15 years later.
And it is still, indeed true, 15 years later, that despite living what appears to be a fairly transparent existence online, it is true that I let remarkably few people close (pretty much 1 to be exact), especially in person, and I have learned indeed to put on a really, really great cover.
In that paragraph, I hear the angst in my writing. I hear the quiet despondency and horror of having had my social sphere knocked out from under me just the year prior.
On February 3, 2011, Porter would have been four and a half and Liam would have been not quite three. We were indeed in the thick of it with two very funny little boys. I was in no way prepared to give them the attention they deserved.
In 2011, the world was falling apart in just about every way possible.
And so, in 2011, the boys went to daycare despite me not working.
Jared kept all of us going, day and night.
I had visions of a “Mommy Blog,” and was not-so-quietly desperate to get back to some semblance of a professional life.
And for sure, whatever beginnings of a social life we’d had the year prior was long gone. Church was kind but most people were distant.
I was taking on the full identity of “sick Caroline.” And, quietly dying, horrified and terror-filled, inside.
And in that paragraph above, I was trying to not betray that any one bit of that was actually happening.
Over the next little while, I’m going to revisit some of those old posts, with updated commentary.
February of 2011 was the quiet beginning of a new sort of lifestyle: a different kind of childhood for my boys than I imagined, a different sort of marriage dynamic than I’d imagined.
A different kind of life than I’d grown up dreaming about.
And it’s been beautiful in its own way. Arguably, my boys had a more present mother because of that season of life.
And if I could go back and tell the girl, who probably drafted that “about” paragraph in between sobbing episodes, anything at all, it would be this:
Those two little boys that you worry about: they will grow up to be stellarly wonderful men in spite of whatever shortcomings you have. That man you married, that man that you feel growing ever distant with the stress of life right now: this marriage that is being tested is going to find its own comfortable peace and that man is your safe haven. And the career days may very well be done, and that will always hurt. And you, dear girl, your tears are not in vain. There’s a beauty in the growth going on right now. Do not lose hope.
That is what I would tell my 15 years’ younger self today. Because it is the same thing I can tell myself today, in 2026.
Sunday I felt the sting of a 16-year old mortification-friend-rejection again in Costco. Jared is right: there are people who cannot handle me in my more fragile states, and this person was one more of those. It doesn’t hurt any less, though. Jared assures me that I am not crazy but knowing there are people in the world who have rejected me due to my mental health does not exactly engender confidence in that area.
My life has taken twists and turns due to various mental health episodes, some more public than others. It’s affected every aspect of my life, but especially friendships and employment prospects.
And I’m nursing my ego wound by plunging my energy back into jute bag making. I’m over halfway done with the current one though it means figuring out the invisible join again because one spool of 6-ply jute is not quite enough to make two bags and this is the second bag I have made with the original spool.
On the topic of bags, I am sad because my original sourcing for the leather straps has inflated their prices, I am 100% certain due to the unfortunate tariff situation in this country. I found an alternative but it will mean the bags need to be smaller to accommodate the strap.
I confessed to Jared that this morning it was awfully hard to not bite the bullet and buy a Fuji X-H2….the old compulsion to spend to make myself feel better. It won’t solve one little thing and will only create other problems, so it is not happening at all, of course. Thankfully I have developed the discipline to say no to myself.
At any rate, this morning I found myself wallowing in the bed, texting Jared to say that I am worthless, that nobody wants to be my friend.
Which is of course objectively not true: I have a wide circle of wonderful friends.
It doesn’t make the stinging tears of shame over broken relationships due to the past any less painful at all, though.
25 years ago today, I survived psychological torture and likely real physical danger.
And the particulars don’t matter anymore; I am safe in February 10, 2026, not February 10, 2001.
But I have to wonder what my neighbors of the time thought. They had to hear the screams; I screamed for my life that night. No one responded. It was a 55+ community probably not used to domestic violence issues.
I don’t have to wonder about why it took that precise incident for me to decide to have the boyfriend of the time move out. It took precisely that sequence of events to upend our lives like that.
And I don’t have to wonder because I know: I reclaimed his old room as my own, and rechristened the energy of that space the very day my Mommy came to clean up the trashed apartment he left in his wake on the last day of February when he moved out.
My Mommy brought my baby cat Cricket to live with me that day, and Cricket and I went on to live there a good while longer.
And that day, that lowest of lows, was a turning point. It was the day I decided no man was worth my safety. No man, no matter how long I’d known him, was worth giving up my self-respect.
I was done settling after that night.
Thankfully, mostly good men followed that purging of my life.
I am so grateful that I got to marry the best one.
Jared is the one who has tolerated living in the light 24 hours a day for years on end.
Jared is the one who answers the ghosts that aren’t there when I hear noises in the night.
And Jared is the one who wants nothing from me other than my happiness. He doesn’t ask me to be anything other than real, he doesn’t ask me to perform for him.
He only asks me to accept his love as a gift. And that it is: a gift.
And 25 years on: I know for a fact karma is real, as sad as that is to say in this particular instance.
Tonight I will go to bed safe, having worked on a new jute bag for most of the day.
And I will go to bed grateful for the new lease on life I got in 2001.
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