5. Never stop learning.

The moment you think you’ve come far enough and become stagnant, you WILL be left behind. Make sure that no matter how busy you get, you always make time to stay ahead of the curve. Amazing advances are happening in our industry right now, and there are new people getting into it all the time. One advantage new photographers have is plenty of time to be looking at the latest and greatest. Why? Because they don’t have a big backlog of work built up.

Set aside time to always continue educating yourself. Put it on your to-do list and calendar. Once that time is on the calendar, don’t push it back because other things come up. Innovating may not seem important at the time, but it will seem really important if you don’t do it. You’ll come to realize that things have advanced so far so fast that you don’t even know where to begin and will feel like giving up before you even start. Don’t let this happen to you!

What are some ways you can keep learning today? Assess your strengths and weaknesses and determine the areas you’d like to focus on. Then, take a look around to see what avenues you can use to improve. Workshops, conventions, forums, webinars, and educational blogs are a great place to start. Give yourself an allotted time every week whether it be 30 minutes or a few hours. Some tools are free and some you pay for; but something that is always free is practice! So you’re not good at shooting in harsh lighting conditions – grab a friend and practice in the harshest light you can find. Find a technique you’d like to implement on an educational blog and try it out. Search out threads on forums where people are talking about topics that are of interest to you. Engage, take initiative, and make things happen! There are many ways to stretch yourself and learn at your own pace, with the time you have at hand. The main thing is this: Get out there and do it.

So—what are you waiting for?

The camera bag is officially packed for the hospital – for real this time!  There for a while it seems like it was every week that Sean would ask if we were done with shoots before the baby arrived and just when we thought we were finished, we would unpack that camera bag again for something else. :0)  Our final shoot was with these two lovely people.  They braved the cold to be our models for a private consult and we are so appreciative!  Thanks guys!  You rocked it! :0)

A dear friend recently reminded me of a very important truth: we are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories. That got me to thinking.  How many times do we say to ourselves, “oh I don’t need another picture of me” or in some other way pass off capturing our own life as insignificant?  I know I think this way all the time and yet I would kill for photographs of those insignificant moments in the lives of my grandparents.  After their weddings, couples say that they won’t need photos of the two of them for many years now.  Every year when someone older wins a portrait session through the St. Jude Dream Home Giveaway, they pass it on to their kids or a friend saying that they just don’t need photos of themselves. Maybe you don’t need more photos of yourself but those photos are not for you. That is the important thing that we all need to remember.

Taking it one step further, here is my biggest conviction from that conversation (can you relate?): we are so careful to back up and re-back up our clients images, but not our own. They’re on our computers here at our house and if someone were to break in and steal those computers, or if a fire claimed our office, all of our personal photos would be gone.  I’m working on changing that right now as we move a copy of all our personal images off-site to be stored with our client images.  This is so important!  If you don’t have a company for off-site storage, at least burn a dvd of your images and take them to a family member’s house.  You just never know and we are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories.  It’s time that we take that to heart.

As our files from the last several years begin their move to off-site locations, here are the most recent images we’ve taken for our children and grandchildren.  I hadn’t really planned to do much with this stage in our life.  After all, I was just pregnant and we know what that looks like.  I don’t really feel like I need another picture of me in this state, but this is for our son and his children, so that they can glimpse back into this insignificant moment in our life and hopefully know us a little better for it.

They’ll know a little better just how much we loved him before he was even born and how much we anticipated his arrival into our lives…

They’ll remember how much new gadgets, like a new remote shutter trigger, fascinate Sean and how funny he can be. :0)

They’ll see how I humored him and those gadgets…

…until I didn’t ;0)

They’ll glimpse the younger selves of their elders, who we are as a couple, and hopefully still see some of this in us all those years later.

Most importantly, we hope that they’ll see love and remember us for it.

We are the custodians of our children and grandchildren’s memories – of their heritage.  No matter how insignificant our life’s moments may seem to us, I plan to move forward both documenting it and preserving it well.  We hope you’ll do the same.