Welcome to my first post on my first blog! “Live life with photos” (LLWP) will hopefully be an adventure that you will enjoying taking with me. I say adventure because I have a goal in 2009 of making photos a daily part of my life and I hope I inspire others to do so as well.
A little background: I work with photos for a living. I sadly don’t get to go out and take photos and get paid for it, but I do get to work inside of Photoshop and tweak them and make them work for print or the web. I work for a “web-to-print” company and I am responsible for making the images of products that are sent to me into different sizes for different the viewers on websites and in some cases, make sure the photos will print correctly. My background is in Graphic Design. I received my degree from UMBC (The University of Maryland, Baltimore County). I have worked for a variety of companies (i.e. ad agencies, publishing companies, printing companies, freelance work) and I have always had to work with images. I am not a pro at taking photos or working with them, but I know enough.
I would love to be a photographer but the competition is fierce and I hate being out of my house at night and on the weekends. If my husband could go with me, then I’d be fine. So I seem to be choosing to be giving up something that I would really enjoy. Maybe some day…
On a personal level, photos are the “butter to bread” in my life, (my family is chocolate!). Do I do a lot with photos though, no. Why? What I know I can do with them, or should do with them, intimates me. So I let them sit on the memory cards or on my computer and only see them when the pass by on my computer’s screen saver.
I have a digital SLR, a Canon Rebel XT. I have gone through times when I have understood the functions but am currently at a loss. I let the camera sit while I loose the knowledge because I won’t get out there and practice. Why won’t I? Because I feel like I must use those functions and that if I want to use the camera, the photos must be good. Getting the impression that I put a lot of pressure on myself when it comes to photos? If so, you’re right.
The pressure continues for printing them out to. I have some great photos from trips or family moments that would look fabulous up on a wall in a collage of frames, but that would require that I get to only pick out a few (out of the thousands that I have), and then it would require that I spend money on the printing and the frames (I’m always poor, or at least justify why I can’t spend the money on photos). Then I would have to arrange the frames and put my self out there to get criticized by those who see my display. They may think the photos are not great, or my arrangement sucks. The nails in the wall seem so permanent! I may also always look at the photos and know that I could have blown them up differently, cropped them differently, make them more artsy and interesting.
I am not lying that I have thousands of photos. I just had my first baby this past year, he alone probably has a 1,000 or more. I have so many great ones of my son, Gavin, or of family members that I really do want to share. So this Christmas I decided to just F@#$%! it and printed out a ton and to mentally pretended that I don’t know how to go in and tweak the color levels, Photoshop out blemishes, or add filters. I just uploaded them to CVS’s website and had my husband pick them up an hour later.
How did it go you ask? Well it took me a couple of hours to upload the photos because I had so much fun doing it! The photos were only 10 cents for a 4×6 and I had 380 photos printed! That only cost me $38!! And that was actually many gifts rolled up into that cost. I went to the Family Dollar and bought 3 frames, only cost me $5! So for $43, I had a bunch of gifts AND I stuck a photo in one of the frames that I bought and put it out on my living room coffee table!! I love it! I’m so proud of myself! That cost me $2.10 +tax. Not bad!!
By the way, I upload photos to Flickr for family that lives elsewhere and I’m a Ritz photo card member, but I am really pleased with CVS’s website. A website’s ability to upload the photos and the shipping of the photos is a big reason why I drag my feet with developing photos. Ritz’s website freezes on me but they gave me a CD with a program when I rejoined the membership so I will have to see how that goes.
I haven’t really talked about my feelings for photos. I’ve decided that I’m not going to today, but I will another day. Today I am starting something new with my son, cutting his naps short. He’s almost 11 months old and takes 2 naps a day, both 3hours long. Since I work from home that I very ideal. But I’ve noticed that I am starting to dread the evenings after dinner because my husband and I have no life. Well actually I have a great life, very ideal, but I miss my old evenings of sitting of the tv and playing around on the computer. Last night Gavin went down at 7:00pm and I got to update my Facebook page and say hi to friends! I was in heaven!!! So I’m determined to start cutting his naps down so he’ll be tired sooner. How is that going to affect work? It won’t be good. I’m already worried about work. Although Gavin sleeps so well, the hours b/t the naps is becoming longer and longer, we are currently up to 4 hours. That is that on most days he wakes up at 11:30 and doesn’t go back down to 3:30. I try to get back into work and just when I get going, my husband gets home from work around 5:15. My office is in the kitchen. I do have a spare bedroom to work in, but I need to be able to work at the same time that Gavin is awake too, so the kitchen is the best place for that.
Ok, well I did it! I wrote my first post. I have so many things that I want to talk about, all concerning photos in some capacity.
Talk to you soon and have a great day! Off to wake up my son…
Brooke
