Embracing change

FRANK SHATZ
“Change is part of life, and you should learn to be comfortable with change. Change brings renewed opportunity. Reach down deep and find things that drive you, and then turn those things into opportunity,” Dr. Ellen Kean Rudolph said.

Although she was trained as a counseling psychologist and family therapist, her advice doesn’t derive from textbooks. When she talks about welcoming or even seeking change, she uses her own life experiences as a guiding path.

Globalization often forces people to change careers and learn new skills. This might cause high anxiety. It doesn’t have to. Rudolph had dealt with change all her life. She did so at times by necessity, sometime by choice.

Shortly after her third birthday, Rudolph was hit by a car and hospitalized with all four limbs in traction for many months. “It was a pivotal time in my life as I literally watched the world go by from a window next to my bed,” she recalled.

She was the product of the Minnesota foster care system. She had five brothers, and they were moved around as a group in 17 different foster homes. At age 6, she was adopted by a physician and his wife. “I flourished with Doc and Pearl Kean. I was game for everything.”

She learned to play the piano and the flute, became a tap dancer, took up water and snow skiing, served as an organist for local choirs and learned Spanish. “Life to me was like a smorgasbord and everything out there looked exciting.”

At the University of Minnesota, she earned degrees in sociology and the humanities, but went on to graduate school, “because I wanted to know more.”

She earned a doctorate in education/counseling psychology at William and Mary, and for 25 years worked in the mental health field, which ranged from teaching, to outpatient therapy services to couples and families, to consultations and lecturing. Concurrently, she served on numerous community advisory boards and for 14 years as the president of the Williamsburg Area S.P.C.A.

Always an experimenter, Rudolph got interested in the art of photography. She was becoming disenchanted with the mounting bureaucratic interference in providing services to her patients and was ready for a career change.

“Originally, photography was just a hobby for me. But soon I realized that there were not that many who really understood the subjects that they were shooting. I set out to rectify that.”

The camera enabled her to combine the artist in her with the technical skills and knowledge of how to utilize computers in photography. She become the host of AOL’s popular online photography forums and mentored thousands of photographers over the next 15 years. She became the official photographer for Williamsburg’s Tercentenary celebrations, VIP photographer for the College of William & Mary and contract photographer for Environmental Research Inc.,which involved her in major projects in such places as South Africa, Namibia, Singapore, Australia, Suriname and France.

She also made a name for herself as a photographer of Virginia’s flora and fauna and as a creator of unique digital imagining. Her photos have been published in numerous newspapers and national magazines. She has won many awards.

Nowadays, Rudolph is writing and publishing photo-driven children’s books. Her latest creation is “Willi Gets a History Lesson in Virginia’s Historic Triangle.” It is an educational story in the form of a tour of the historic area, seen from a dog’s perspective.

Her next project is a children’s book about space exploration. “Willi will be the heroine there too,” she said. “NASA has been very helpful in making space images from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory available to me. I was also given behind-the-scenes photography opportunities at the Kennedy Space Center.”

In the meantime, Rudolph was documenting the construction of a Barna Log Home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. “It is a step-by-step, photo-driven documentation of the entire turn-key process,” she writes on her Web site.

To date, her www.tnlogblog.com has been visited by more than 400,000 people who want to leave the rush of urban living for the peacefulness of log cabin living.

What is her advice to those who face sudden and drastic changes in their lives? “Make a point to learn something new every day. Talk to everybody. Try everything. Embrace and rejoice in the natural world. Laugh a lot. Let your creative self emerge. You can work for yourself. Get out of that box and turn some stones over for yourself.”

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Frank Shatz lives in Williamsburg, Va. and Lake Placid. His column was reprinted with permission from The Virginia Gazette.