2012 Resolution #1

Today at play group I got to finally meet and talk to the new girl in our ward who a couple of friends of mine have been telling me is also a photographer. I'm always really insecure when it comes to my photography because I suffer from the same thing a lot of photographers do, comparison to other photographers, fear of not being successful, trying to manage your life and your job. It's hard. I have a lot of moments where I feel really confident and excited and proud, but they are always intermixed with the other. Needless to say, I wasn't excited to get to know her because I didn't want to feel threatened, or feel like I'd have competition with my base of amazing friends and clients in my ward whose pictures I take every year.

Thankfully, she's super nice. And, she's also a fairly new photographer, so after seeing her website I was slightly happy that she seems a little more green in the business and less crafted than I am. Is that horrible of me to say? That I was happy to discover she's not as good as me? Yeah, probably. But it does help with the ego.

After I looked through her blog for a while I decided to sit and look at my website and my blog because I have wanted to do some price structure updating, some logo tweaks, and better incorporate the themes on my blog and website to make them more cohesive. As I was sitting there looking at years of hard work, energy, time, time away from my kids, time away from my husband, I realized how grateful I was to have my little business. I haven't been extremely busy lately. I haven't shot nearly as much as in years past, but I got so emotional looking at all of the faces, the smiles, the laughs, the relationships, the babies and I was just proud. And grateful.

Having an art form, a craft that you love is like having another child. It's something that takes nurturing and I am not always perfect. It's a struggle to keep inspired, to keep clients, to manage the workflow. But I realized then how much I truly love what I do. I created this little baby of mine what seems like ages ago and it's slowly growing into the perfect little subculture to my own life. Another part of me that makes me, well, me. It sounds so silly, but I really needed the experience I had this morning: the rediscovery of my own photography. I'm hoping in the next few months and years I can keep it growing into something better, more refined, more welcoming. So that when a client sits down to look at my work like I did this morning, they will fall in love with it just like I have.

This is just one of my resolutions for 2012.