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.
