This is Richard Corbett from Newtonards in Northern Ireland, and you're listening to The Candid Frame.

Many of you know Karen Hutton, in her role as a landscape and travel photographer as well as an educator,

an author, and even a voice artist. But along with her exceptional body of work, she brings to it

all an appreciation for what makes photography such a unique and special creative practice. She describes it as all, an instance of wonder that is more

about the moment of revelation than just the click of a shutter. But Karen also recognizes that there is a lot

of hard work behind creating the circumstances for such magic moments to occur.

It can often demand that you push yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of.

There's an adventure climbing, an adventure hiking, an adventuring.

There's the thing where you push yourself past the point

you think you can do something like it's a harder climb or a longer hike and you think you can't do

it and then you get to the other side and the, you know, the choir of angel feeling that you

get at the end, it's like it elevates you.

It takes you a whole new place and it shifts you. I call it awe. It's like a moment of awe.

And I knew that I just had to slog until it was done because I knew what I would have at the other end was some freedom.

Karen understands that the creative process, if it's going to mean anything, will demand moving

beyond the status quo, which can be terrifying and confusing, but also liberating and joyful.

But such moments always arrive at a critical time when you can either

decide to stop or press on. So, but when I start feeling crappy, I don't want to say, I want to say

I welcome it, not because I like to feel that way, but because I know, okay, I'm in a growth spurt here.

And if I can sit with this and I can breathe through this, like I'm facing a couple things right now,

where I'm like, you know, I just want to quit at, I don't know how to do that.

And I'm like, really, really?

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