The Spirit Craft Collective

A pocket zoom with weekend-vibes. The Freedom Zoom EX turns errands into photo ops—flip it on, slide to panorama if you’re feeling cinematic, and let the ~39–125mm glass do the rest. It’s the kind of point-and-shoot that rewards instinct: quick AF, friendly flash, and a surprising close-focus for little details. Easy. Breezy. Reliably capable in its own way. Paid $3 at a local St Vinnies for mine and it is in mint condition!

Origin Story

Here’s how I tell it, straight from the darkroom:

Folks think the Minolta on my shelf is just another rescue from the yard-sale bin. Plastic, silver, a little sun-faded at the strap lugs. But around here we call her Mama Mini—Minny if she’s teasing—and she is more than gears and glass. She’s a ’90s mom who never clocked out. Three kids once tugging at her sleeves: a soccer son, an artist daughter, a writer son who always ran out of notebook pages at the worst time.

She bought the Minolta for sideline Saturdays. Orange slices. Grass stains. Whole albums of knees and elbows and crooked goals. Later, there were refrigerator-door masterpieces, and school plays where the focus missed but the joy didn’t. She shot it all. She said pictures were how you packed a day’s lunch for the future.

When the sickness came, she kept the camera in reach. The last frame—taken by a nurse with gentle hands—caught her in the hospital bed with her kids leaned close, everybody pretending not to cry. Flash. And that was the tether. She went where the Minolta went, and the Minolta came to me.

I didn’t know at first. Just felt a tug on the shutter. Then the advice started, soft as a hand on my shoulder.

“Lightkeeper, sweetheart, you brought extra batteries, right?”
“Name your files like you mean it. ‘IMG_003’ won’t remember your birthday.”
“Wipe the lens—no, not on your shirt. Lord have mercy.”

She talks like the carpool lane never ended, like somebody still needs a snack before kickoff. Now that she’s with Spirit Craft Studio, she treats every spirit like one of her own. Big Gus tries to carry four tripods at once? “Two trips won’t kill you, handsome.” Penelope hides in the Polaroid and sticks out her little paper tongue? “Very cute, sugar. Now apologize.” Rockin’ Rene spikes the exposure like a dive-bar strobe? “Water break. And a sandwich. You too, J.”

I asked about her kids exactly once. She went quiet, not sad—just steady, like the quiet right before a photo clears. Then she said, “They’re good. They’re exactly themselves.” We check in now and then, carefully. No haunting, no rattling chains. Sometimes it’s a print sent through a friend-of-a-friend. Sometimes it’s me driving the long way home, passing a mural on a brick wall—bright birds and laundry lines—and Minny humming low: “That’s my girl.” The soccer boy grew into a grown man with a whistle and a field of scrappy kids who worship the grass he walks on. The writer son teaches, edits, sends pages into the world like paper boats. Not famous. Better: sturdy. She doesn’t ask for more than to know they are eating, sleeping, calling their grandmother, wearing sunscreen.

And she mothers me, too, which I pretend to hate and fully need. She proofreads my calendar. She keeps a moral inventory of the gear bag: film, tape, safety pins, one peppermint, three Band-Aids, a printed map for when the phone dies. “A good kit is love you packed earlier,” she says. I don’t argue.

Sometimes grief leaks into the pictures. Not heavy—just a seam you can see if you tilt the print. In one shot, Annie is all ears and joy, but there’s a hospital bracelet faint in the bokeh like a pale ring. Minny squeezes the shutter through me and says, “That’s okay. Life keeps every receipt.” Then she’s back to business: “J, mind your horizon line. Also eat.”

She is the only ghost I know who tells the long version and still keeps us moving. She knows when to linger on a face and when to let the scene breathe. And she’s forward-looking in the way real mothers are: calendars inked, shoes by the door, hope laid out like tomorrow’s outfit.

When she gets brave enough to talk about the end, it’s this: the nurse’s hand, the kids crowding in, the click, and a light like a hallway with every switch already flipped—“tacky fluorescent, dear, truly unflattering”—and then the Minolta’s familiar weight. “I figured if I had to go anywhere,” she says, “I might as well go where the pictures live.”

So she stayed. With us. With the work.

On slow afternoons, I catch her arranging our little collective for a family picture that never quite gets taken. Gus dusts the backdrop because she asked nice. Rene tucks a safety pin into the hem of a seamless roll, muttering but smiling. Penelope peeks, tongue out, then blushes and hides. Minny counts heads, then counts them again. “Everyone here? Good. Chin up. Shoulders soft. Look at the person you love.”

I press the shutter. The frame fills with patience, with pep talks, with a thousand tiny fixes only a mama would notice. The print comes up warm around the edges.

“Label it,” she says, satisfied. “Spirit Craft Studio—family, Tuesday.”

I write it down. I eat the peppermint. I pack the bag for tomorrow like love I’ll need later.

And Minny hums in my hands, ready for the next thing.

Fueled By Coffee

(And Your Kind Support)

I run this cozy little ad-free corner of the internet for the joy of it.

I chase light, not clicks. I make photos. If this place brings a smile to your face please know: your support keeps film in the camera, coffee in the cup, and the adventures rolling.

Click on the coffee cup to toss in a few coins, if you like.

No pressure.

Either way, thank you for being a part of the collective

and helping my vision grow.