determined

In less than a year I won't live in this state anymore.  Hopefully, we'll be buying our first home, settling into where we're going to live for maybe the next ten years of our lives.  In less than a year, many things about my life will have changed.  This means that currently I'm taking the time to set some goals, not for where I want to be, physically, but with what I want to be doing.

Photography has taken up a large part of my life.  In fact, many of the Christmas presents I received revolved around photography.  Much of my spending money over the past year has been spent on photography.  It stands to reason that one of my goals for the new year would be to dedicate more time towards photography.  Okay, great: I resolve to spend more time working on my photography.  Awesome, six months later later y'all ask me, how's that working out for you?  How would I respond?  Probably with a generic answer - "great!"

Instead, what I would like to do is attack this from several different levels.  First, I am going to finish my course on Photoshop CS6 that I began back in Spring of 2012 and continue taking classes.  Currently, I have 22 classes in my queue in my online program.  Some focus on photography and some focus on editing and/or design.  Probably I could take the editing alongside the photography, and I will see if this works after a solid week or so of CS6.  After all, there is a reason that school starts after the holiday season.  I do have a plan on how to finish this course - and take other courses.  I get off work an hour before my husband does - and two days a week I am already home - I will spend those two days a week on my courses.

Next - concurrently I will be working on my photography projects.   The first of which will be a photography book from our time in Europe.  Already I have researched the sites quite thoroughly and have chosen one for my book.  It will take extensive work on my part, I have only a handful of pictures processed so far, and organizing them and then deciding how I would like them presented...I'm quite literally terrified.  I'm a terrible perfectionist when it comes to layout and design and I'm worried I might not be able to decide on all of the details. But I will force myself to do so, and then when I'm done - there will be other projects.

Also concurrently I will continue printing off a variety of my photos (others found here) playing with different types of paper (currently I love metallic paper).  Showing off my pictures has also netted me a couple sales, I've sold my clock in an 8x12 on the paper and my Prater picture in an 12x18 on the metallic paper.

There was another aspect that I almost forgot!  How could I have almost forgotten!  Sure and I have hundreds of images to process already, but I still need to go out and take more photos!  Especially as I said in my very first paragraph - in less than a year I won't be living in this state.  I'll have a whole new place to photograph, which means I need to capture as many shots of this place as I can while I'm here.  I can't just rest on the images I already  have, I need to create more so that it just keeps going and going and going and on those rainy days when I think I've processed everything, I find I still have some left to do...

I'm still a writer - I'll always be a writer.  That doesn't mean I can't expand my horizons, which I am currently doing with a four pronged attack.  Learn as much as I can from "book training", use it in the one big project I'm planning, and the smaller printing as well, and where ever I am, whatever else I do, keep taking pictures (and keep writing).