A Day in LA with Sue Bryce - part 1

My thank you card to her on the left, her flower wall on the right.

Last August Sue Bryce put out a call to all owners of 28 Days with Sue Bryce, her trailblazing workshop for portrait photographers produced by creativeLIVE.

Thousands of us had purchased the download, knowing that it would teach us a business model that would set our studios in motion.

Her request? To write a testimonial about the workshop and share it on social media, then she would treat one of us to a day at her LA studio. What an unbelievable opportunity! I wrote from the heart and hoped for the best. A few weeks later, when Sue posted 50 of the testimonials on her blog, my heart skipped a beat when I saw mine.

Many powerful stories were shared, and I was honored to have mine included among them. We didn’t know how or when the lucky person would be chosen, so we waited. Then suddenly, right before Thanksgiving, I got the happy news! And how it arrived is worthy of a story.

Lori Patrick is the amazing woman that runs several Facebook communities, where portrait photographers learn from each other and from our fearless leader Sue Bryce. IBWS (In Bed with Sue) has over 20,000 members! It was in The 28 Day Study Group that Lori made an exciting announcement.

When I joined the conversation two hours later there were almost a thousand posts on the thread already! Like Rebecca, I was hoping for a new workshop from Sue. As the hours passed, and the exciting news had not yet been revealed, things got very silly. People were posting selfies of themselves at the movies, on the toilet, pulling chin hairs, drinking wine – I poured myself a glass of red and joined the fun.

Eventually I put my phone away and joined my teenage daughter for an episode of Gilmore Girls, our way of ushering in the beginning of the weekend. Then, suddenly my phone got very excited and was bouncing on the couch. After I checked my messages and logged back onto Facebook, soon it was I who was bouncing on the couch. WOW!

This group is made up of talented, hardworking and very generous photographers from all around the world who work in community to raise the level of our industry. I feel lucky beyond belief to have won the coveted golden ticket, and will soon blog about my trip to the chocolate factory (aka the glamour studio).

Until then, let me explain the pictures of the flowers at the beginning of this entry. I made the image on the left as an expression of how I feel about Sue. She is the lavender colored bloom that stands out among the rest. She has a flare for beauty and radiates it herself. The flower wall that she built (on the right) is a testament to her playfulness, creativity, resourcefulness, work ethic, and resilience. For those of us who know that it took her years to collect the flowers and 17 hours and a bottle of red wine to make the wall, we recognize that Sue is a symbol of perseverance, with a capital P.

With that in mind, I shall get back to work.  Cheers to you Sue, and thank you!