Luminous Stories

...At this time I was calling them ‘Luminous Stories’. And I was giving serious thought to how to make them valuable to people, how to give them an ostensible purpose.

This is what I said about them at the time:

Introducing the Luminous Story, a collection of evocative photographic portraits overlaid with quotations, testimonials, lyrics, poetry, taglines and bits of biography, crafted to convey the depth, personality, and character of a three-dimensional person. Each portrait is a pane in the stained-glass window of you.

I really believed that what this concept needed was a clear business purpose and I thought that if I could figure out a way to drive web traffic to it and, more importantly, to have them show up in search results, then its value as a promotion tool would be clear.

A Luminous Story is modular. Each pane of the mosaic is a stand-alone portrait designed to convey a fragment of your authentic self. They're for individuals and groups looking to capture their mojo, enhance their online personas and convey the unique story of their personal brand.

I was obsessed with the idea of modularity.

I wanted to come up with a practical application for these things that the average person would find useful. The Marshall Guttenberg piece I did in the previous post (Marshall Guttenberg), and subsequently a piece I did for my daughter’s best friend, both were created with this concept in mind.

But I took that one a step further.

I wrote a short essay for each piece of her mosaic that linked to both the master image and the subsequent essay. What I imagined was that the reader would follow this trail of breadcrumbs to complete the full picture. I consider this the first fully realized ‘ODE’ but unfortunately was not able to post it on social media because of privacy issues.

Introducing: ODE

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but Michele came up with the name. It was perfect. We had been struggling for so long to name it that we ran with this.

At the same time Michele also turned me onto this photographer in Petaluma who was hand writing on photos. When I saw this person’s work it clicked. Because it demonstrated several concepts that I found very inspiring.

While I didn’t think literally hand-writing each ODE would be practical, I did like the look of a hand-crafted piece. I immediately began work on one using an existing photo of a person I knew would be open to the idea.

That’s how these came together.

After making about ten like this I found the shape of an ODE. I learned how to conduct an interview, how to tailor a photo shoot, how to do the post production.

Here’s what I learned:

• I learned that an ODE could be a single image, it didn’t have to be several. You can convey a lot of information in one panel.
• I learned that an ODE can be a large image, and that having to zoom in and discover was a good thing. An ODE can be interactive.
• I learned that an ODE can be a calling card.
• I learned that an ODE can be a visual poem.
• I learned that each ODE is different.
• I developed a technique, a voice, a process.

That’s when we began to work on our first ODEs for pay. Michele found the clients and I did the production. At this point we didn’t even know what we could charge, what we needed to charge, but we learned how much work these are and created a rate card....

(To Be Continued)