Life

Hey everyone,
So, my last post was awhile ago, and before that, well, that was awhile ago too :)

Right now there is a lot of crazy stuff going on. I would love to sit at home and just blog and do photography stuff all day! I am sure a lot of you would like that. But in reality, I have an intense job, I work 12 hour shifts, 2 weeks overnights and 2 weeks day shift 7am-7pm. I have a two and a half year old son, and me and my wife are expecting our second child!! She is around 13 weeks along at this point, we have no idea what it will be (maybe a girl?? shhh).

All this stuff (aka, LIFE) got me thinking. I am trying to do too much at once. Who can balance working shift work, spending time with my family, photography, kung fu, etc? It's too much sometimes! I read a great series over at Thom Hogan's site about getting back to basics (article here, a great read for every photographer!). He talks about all these new cameras, with auto everything, lenses with VR, autofocus, auto exposure, auto flash, etc etc etc etc. He also mentions (not sure if it's in the same article, but relevant) the emails he gets from people saying they are going on vacation next week, whats the best lens to bring?

So this boils down to people getting "lazy" for want of a better word, with the whole photography process, and getting hung up on gear. I am guilty of this too, I have spend countless hours online, researching, pixel peeping high res shots from various lenses I was interested in, looking at specs of cameras, tripods, MTF charts, distortion characteristics, whatever. I think we need to step back and focus on why we are doing all this stuff, a love for photography! Some of the best photographic memories I have are wandering around my old hometown with a friend, armed with our Olympus OM-1's, and our 50mm lens, taking shots of whatever caught our eyes. There was no auto exposure, no matrix metering, no aperture priority mode, no auto focus. I am starting to ramble here, but the whole gist of this article by Thom Hogan was get out there and grab your camera, grab a 50mm lens (or your favourite prime lens for that matter), set everything to manual and get back to basics.

Well, that article really hit me close to home, sometimes I need to do that with my life! Don't worry about all the other stuff, spend time with my family, play trucks with my son, relax and watch a movie with my wife. Sometimes I think I need to do everything, that I won't have a chance later, or that I need to process those images right away. The majority of the time that stuff can wait. Unless you are a pro photographer, life usually gets in between you and your hobbies. But as long as you can set aside some time for them, to keep sane so to speak, then worry about the really important things.

Anyways, that was quite a rant. It's late, I have been painting my living room and need to go to sleep. But head over to Thom's website and read that article (and all the others on there, lots of great information, especially for us Nikon guys :P).

Hopefully, I will be reorganizing my gallery soon. It is a little too complicated with all the different categories I have going on. When I do that, I will hopefully have a few new images to share with you all. I also have an exciting piece of gear coming to me, courtesy of my lovely wife. Stay tuned for more info on that. I will give you a hint, it is not a lens, it was used, and it came from ebay!

In the meantime, remember: SIMPLICITY

Craig