The holidays are always a scattered time for me. It is a high speed hop-scotch game from Halloween to G's birthday to Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Years. Every January I think I will have time to slow down, and every January ends up dedicated to the Post-4-Month-Mayhem-Cleanup. Then we have Valentine's Day - not a big one for me, but the commitments at school seem to get bigger every year... and somehow we suddenly arrive at March.
I had this rather abrupt realization of how quickly time flies a couple days ago... G needed a photo of herself at age 5 or younger for her school yearbook (a big "Then and Now" spread for the 5th graders) I was shocked as I pulled the photos from 2005 out and found a set of photos from the Woodland Park Zoo. I remember that trip very well, G loved the insect building, I saw the bald eagles enclosure for the first time, and we spent a long time wandering through the butterfly house. I swear that trip to the zoo was just a year or two ago... has it really been nearly 8 years?!? How did that happen?
Something similar happened, to a smaller extent, in January. After having cleaned up from the holidays I went to back up my Christmas photos and realized nearly all my SD cards were full. I had not backed up any photos for the previous 8 months or so, and I had swapped cards between events so my photos were out of chronological order. In short, my digital archiving was a mess. Once I had that mess straightened out, it dawned on me that having not backed up photos for so long, I had also not properly edited photos in quite some time... and consequently hadn't updated my photography site much either.
I blame it on allowing myself to be distracted by Facebook. Over the last few years it has been easy to download my SD cards, do an initial pass-through of the photos (because I just can't WAIT to see them!) and edit/post one of my favorites to Facebook. Then I move on to the next shooting adventure. I've somehow tricked my brain into believing I've updated something, therefore I easily forget that the really meaningful work has yet to be done.
There were some projects in between which took priority. I did some pregnant-belly photos of my friend, some baby photos of my niece, and senior shots of my friend's son, and a few school-related photo shoots - all those projects were promptly edited, as I had people outside of myself waiting on me. So I suppose it isn't *all* due to Facebook.
However, that circles us back around to my lack of blogging. For the last couple months I've spent every non-work computer moment sifting through my archives, getting them in order, selecting, sorting, and editing photos. It was a big job, but somebody had to do it. I'm not yet "caught up" (and I might never be, as I keep on hauling my camera out and shooting at every opportunity) but I aim to get my feet under me, find some balance, and enjoy the journey...
...and make more time to talk about it.
2 comments:
all that, and you've moved... you been a very busy lady, for sure.
glad to see you back on the blogs again. the blog world gets lonelier every day since facebook got hip.
did you really shoot those geese on the lake. what'd they ever do to you?
:) I really need to be more aware when I say "shoot", it is just so much faster to type than "photographed".
Facebook does end up substituting as quick communication... many bloggers I used to follow are on Facebook now, so I end up being more updated there and don't take the time to read blog posts. I do want to get back into blogging more frequently.
This month we finally finished moving everything out of the storage unit, and I thought having everything under one roof would make me feel less scattered. So far, though, it has made me really well aware of just how many old boxes I've been able to ignore for too long.
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