Have you ever felt the need to add some hours to your day to be able to get everything done? Have you hoped for another minute with a loved one? Are you worried about minutes, days, or even years running by like the dwindling sand in an hourglass? I think every one of us has been in a situation where we would love to have more time. I see this in my friends living the busiest years of their lives and I certainly see it in my own life, trying to balance work with family, and saving some time for creative work and inspiration as well.

The idea for this conceptual image came to me almost 6 months ago, but ironically, it took this long to find the time to make it happen. My vision was to picture a man trying to add sand to the hourglass of his life and show him struggling to gather dry sand in the pouring rain, despairing over this impossible task. Like with most of my ideas, early on I just sketched out the concept and left it to brew in the back of my head. A month or two ago I started to figure out what would it take to make this photoshoot happen, searching for items like the wooden hourglass from the Etsy store and an old bucket from a flea market. Finally, I had to decide who would be suitable to be the model in this and ended up choosing myself to portray a desperate guy running out of time, feeling that I should be able to deliver this particular feeling very well.

On a cold fall day, I grabbed a shovel in our backyard and started the shoveling and dispairing while my wife hosed me soaking wet and my son was pressing the shutter of the camera I had set up. The water was blessedly warm, but I was still half-frozen running back inside after the photoshoot. After I got the pictures I wanted, I shot the hourglass against the green screen and then spent a good deal of time retouching all the details together. I kept switching around the different parts of the image, not happy with the layout until everything just snapped in place; this is how it is supposed to look. So, after some months of planning, fifteen minutes of family fun, and some hours of creative work, here it is:

“Running out of time”.

Running out of time