Honoured

I almost forgot to blog this! :)

Troy and Aimee Grover have been favourites of mine for most of this year. They are amazing photographers, and Aimee used to have a beautiful blog called Homespun Forte which I absolutely ADORED. Plus they are just all around nice people.

So when this video rolled around at Christmastime, I was blown away. To be honoured by people who you look up to and learn from, who are all the way over in California, was an amazing Christmas present.

Thanks again Aimee and Troy. This video still puts a smile on my face :)

Merry Christmas from the Grovers :) from Troy Grover on Vimeo.

Check out Aimee's old blog for amazing DIY projects and other inspiring stuff, and have a look at their photography site to see why I like them so much! :)

Update

Happy New Year everyone! :)

December was hectic, and I have quite a few things lined up for January that I'm excited for that I'll get to in a minute. Firstly though, here is a little look at my Christmas. This is my family:

And our tree. I love that we have a fibre-optic tree covered in wooden and handmade decorations. It's so pretty, and most of these ornaments are made by my mother, and we've had them as long as I can remember. (She also made our stockings this year out of burlap, but I forgot to take a photo. I will soon.):

After Christmas my good friends Sarah and Caleb got married! :) Then for New Years I joined some friends who were camping in NSW. It was HOT and I am SUNBURNED! Parts of QLD and NSW have been evacuated because of flooding, but the clouds parted for the wedding, and for camping. It was miraculous!

  There were lots of jellyfish on the beach.

So now it is 2011, and I plan to make some changes to my business.

Firstly I want to start blogging more, and more personally. Jasmine Star started out this way, and her clients got to know who she was before they hired her. She was as open and honest and she could possibly be for two reasons: to attract and to repel. By being herself, she is attracting clients who will like her, and repelling those that won't, which in the end makes everybody happy.

When Jasmine started, all she could see were other photographers advertising by price, equipment, credentials, etc. And she didn't have any of that. She had a prosumer camera (like me!), a kit lens, and one CF card. She realised she couldn't win at the game they were playing, so she invented her own game, and IS winning.

So, I may blog boring things, but I want people to hire ME, and not just a "camera-clicker" (as I call it) :)

Another change is my prices. Just slightly. My portrait package now includes 10 high-resolution digital images, and is now $150.

For weddings, I will be working on the package over the next month. I want to start including albums, so I will be making a sample album soon which I am excited for! I'm also looking at getting a Showit website, which will, one day, enable me to design mini-sites for my wedding clients! Here is a post Jasmine did about this. It might explain it better than I could. (And yes, I talk about her a lot. In my house I start a sentence with "Jasmine said..." and my mother knows what I am talking about :)) Jasmine also said this about connecting facebook to Showit, so it seems like it's a pretty good thing to get. That will be happening soon, I'll keep y'all posted.

AND I also hope to purchase one or both of these cameras (1 and 2) and introduce them as another facet to my business. I love old film effects, and I would love to have the option for clients to choose to incorporate a roll of film into their sessions.

So I hope to check all of this off at the end of 2011. 2010 was a BIG year for me, it felt like 10 years, but not a lot actually happened. It was all just internal growth and change, which was great, but I'm over it! :) I am really excited for my business to grow physically.

And, for one last thing, here are two previews of some posts coming up:

one moment... two skies

Wow! Have I been busy or have I been busy!? Sleep is no longer my friend. I've been neglecting him, too busy to keep up our relationship.

This has been an awesome December and this will probably be my last post for the year! I have LOTS more stuff coming up, but I have to admit, I LOVE being busy! I don't get to be very often, which is probably why I love it, but I really do like being physically active, running all over the place.

These two frames are from my last 2010 photo shoot, both taken at the same moment. I turned around after photographing the sunset and saw the moon. Pretty special. :)

I'll get to the rest of the photos from this shoot soon. I have a list that I need to get through first!

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you are enjoying this season as much as I am! :)

Old Bookstores and Christmas Trees

Some thoughts...

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WARNING: This post is longer and deeper than normal... :)
***

Recently I have been amazed upon amazed at the levels of excellence in people in their lives. I hope I never stop being amazed. When I've seen that excellence, I truly believe that these people are doing what they were created to do.

I saw a guy sitting at a computer, his fingers moving over the keyboard SO fast I could barely see them while the screen in front of him filled SO quickly with page upon page of html code. I had to stop and watch. I did not understand a SINGLE thing he was writing, but he knew what he was doing, and it was all in his head. He wasn't reading anything anywhere, he wasn't even looking at the keyboard. It was CRAZY!

A recent obsession with pomegranates led me to Winged Lion on etsy.

Can you believe someone had the creativity to dream this, and the talent to actually make it!? I can't even imagine that process!

My absolute favourite music is by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Creator Paul O'Neill said, "I've always believe that music has the power to transport and transform. The original concept of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra was how to make music have the most emotional impact. We always try to write melodies that are so infectious they don't need lyrics and lyrics so poetic that they don't need a melody, but when you combine the two together they create an alloy where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. Once those songs are woven together into a tapestry they create a story which gives each song a third dimension." Everything he said is SO true.

~

In a book I read a little while ago, Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, he talked about the scripture John 12:25: Anyone who loves his life loses it, but anyone who hates his life in the world will keep it to life eternal. (Whoever has no love for, no concern for, no regard for his life here on earth, but despises it, preserves his life forever and ever.)

I've always struggled a little bit to really understand that. It kind of made me think that I wasn't allowed to enjoy my life, and that only if I suffered all the time could I prove that I was living for God and not myself. I knew that it couldn't be true, but it still haunted me sometimes.

In Wild at Heart, one story, one sentence, one word changed my point of view completely. Self-preservation.

"Life is not a problem to be solved; it is an adventure to be lived. That's the nature of it and has been since the beginning when God set the dangerous stage for this high-stakes drama and called the whole wild enterprise good. He rigged the world in such a way that it only works when we embrace risk as the theme of our lives, which is to say, only when we live by faith." --pg 200

What I now understand is those that play it safe really miss out on living life to the full. If you "love" your life you will want to protect it, preserve it. You won't risk it in any way - not by sky-diving, not by public speaking, not by telling your friends that you believe in Jesus, not by writing a book, not by painting a picture. These things risk your life, your reputation, you might get embarrassed, rejected, people might not like you or what you do.

To "hate" your life to me means that you are willing to put it - not your biological life, but your soul, your heart, who you really are - on the line for what you want and what you believe in. You will risk being embarrassed and go audition for a play. You will climb mountains, build skyscrapers, and write poems, not because it is safe and easy, but because you know it's worth it to live and dream big.

And living by faith in God is a risk just like those. We risk losing our friends, and in some countries even our lives. But eternal LIFE is our gift.

I don't know if I'm making much, or any, sense, but this is just something I've been thinking about for a while and wanted to write down.

I found this video on youtube and I think it's the best picture of what I am now understanding. These people are insane. They clearly "hate" their lives, but I don't think anyone has tasted life the way that they have.

I think that I can compare this to the guy typing the html code, the people that designed and made that pendant, and Paul O'Neill. Just like those base-jumpers decided that simply jumping off a cliff was too boring, that guy wasn't simply typing in code. Winged Lion did not simply make any old pendant. Paul didn't simply write regular, "normal" songs.

I want to be able to say the same about my photography (and one day about my jewellery). I don't want to simply take photos. I don't want to play it safe, I don't want to just do what everyone else is doing because I know that it acceptable and "right". I want to risk. And yes, I will, and HAVE, made terrible mistakes. I get embarrassed about some of my work and wish I would have done it differently. But I learned so much more from those mistakes then I would have if I had just done what was "normal". And next time I try I will get a little bit better.

I know this is a long-winded post, but if you've read it... thanks :) And since no post is complete without a photo of mine, here is one from Scarborough where I had my last wedding of 2010.

The year is almost over, so don't forget to visit my facebook page and enter your names in to win a portrait session with me. I am giving away one every month!

:)