I'm so jealous of the photographers, and his daughter with the camera, who get to be around that iconic form, and rock star presence that is Obama. As the media has shown, and we all know, he's bigger than life...and damn it, I want to have my camera in there too! I want him as my muse, too.
Over my years of shooting, there are a few people in my life that I never tire of looking at, both in reality and through a lens....that spark a dance of spirit and creative possibilities. The images come forth, sometimes through perseverence of waiting and looking, sometimes in a flash of recognition, sometimes as a collaboration as both of us leap into the "zone" creating something combined. The experience of working with a muse is exquisite.

So how can I work with him...satisfy this longing?...... TV screens!

I'm not too sure about copyright laws on this, but it seems to me that pulling a 1/60th of a second from a video feed is more about appropriation than copying....I hope to hell that's the truth of it, anyway.

I need my fix.

There are few people in life who have the magical, alchemical effect of inspiring us not just to delve down and meet our own potential but to also expand the very possibilities and limits of what we can achieve.

These sirens, these alchemists, these catalysts of love force us to shrug off our mental laziness and look at ourselves with new eyes.

Their very beings change us forever, as their words reverberate through our lives like the echoes of a lullaby.

Even though some of us are lucky to meet more than one person like this - there is never a substitute for our first muse.

What a cosmic jolt of energy, what a pure act of love, what grace it is for another person to cause you to think.

Because even though the gifts of the muse originates in the heart, her ultimately good works are completed in the mind.

It is our mental faculties, once stimulated, that leads to great giant which we call imagination to be unleashed.

And so, Mariana Templin, it is no coincidence that I will always love you.

Because you inspired in me, at the tender age of 15, all the virtues of love, perseverance, faith, creativity, thought, and passion that I would ever need.

You taught me how to write - how to make sentences into hugs, how to make a word be just as perfect as a touch.

And even though you said you were a cynic, that you could never love me - you did.

You were and always will be my first love.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise that you were the one to save my life when I was 16.

That I would forget you for other girls at 17. That I would love you once again at 18. That you would haunt me at 19.

And so it shouldn't have been a surprise, that you would leave me, to figure out my own way in this world, just as suddenly as you entered it.

Yet, I still wonder, even after all of these years, whether your steel ever turned to porcelain?

Whether you ever found out if stardust tastes like honey?

Mar, what did you look like when you finally emerged from your cocoon?

I suppose you would be disappointed to find out that I never mastered saying goodbye, but happy to see that I also never stopped dreaming.

And even now, the memory of you, the letters you wrote to me back when the world still had its innocence, and the very air was heavy and dripping with possibilities, those words still urge me forward. Still has the ability to inspire me to new heights.

How, even now, I am still searching for that place, where you can be you and I can be me.