Upgrading...

There has been so much going on lately and I really need to bring you all up to speed, which I will do, presently…

But what I can say right now is that I have outgrown blogger and so I am transferring over to Wordpress as of today. I hope you'll head over there and save that URL to your bookmarks/blogreaders/RSS feeds.

And please, be patient with me, it's a work in progress and I'm a slow learner!

Now is the Time

Back in 1997, at the tender age of 16, I stayed up late one night to watch the Academy Awards. As a teenager with a passion for writing, I was keen to see who would win Best Original Screenplay and, way back in 1997, what I was about to see was a fairytale in the making.

The winners, that year, were a little known duo from Massachusetts. It was their first screenplay and they both starred in the movie. Of course, I'm talking about Good Will Hunting and the writers were Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

When I found out it was their first screenplay, I was enthralled. And from that moment on I dreamed of the time when I, too, would stand on that stage giving my acceptance speech. But this is real life and here I am, 15 years later, with an incredibly well rehearsed (and old) speech and no golden statue on my bookshelf.

It's taken me 15 years to realise that those fairytales are very few and far between and that acclaim like that just doesn't happen without some seriously hard graft first.

But bear with me here because this is not a tale of woe and I am not fishing for sympathy.

In the last 15 years I have done nothing as far as chasing my dreams are concerned. In fact, until I started this little blog just a few months ago, I hadn't written anything more intensive than a shopping list for several years. That's not to say I've wasted that time. I have lived my life in the best way I know how and have learned so much along the way. And I realise, now, that I had to do that living to prepare myself for the hard graft in order to chase those dreams.

Interestingly enough, the Academy Award is no longer the dream. I'm actually not sure what my ultimate goal is yet but I'm starting to get an idea. And it's only now that I realise I am probably closer to accomplishing my goals than I ever was and I finally have the knowledge and life experience to get me there.

Latest Project

A little while ago I got asked by a friend if I would like to take some photographs of her children and newborn niece. In my new spirit of yes (which is getting a little easier each time I do it), I jumped at the chance. Talking to the friend, it sounded like she wanted quite traditional "studio" shots. I had to figure out, quickly, how I was going to manage that on my meagre budget.

We put our heads together and came up with borrowing a projector screen and some fluffy cream rugs from various people and, using the shoot as an excuse, I popped out and bought myself a cheap flashgun. After a little bit of reading up on studio portrait shoots, I felt reasonably ready to go for it.

And here are some of the results…

 

Charlotte

Oliver

Zara

Group Shot

It may surprise you when I say that I'm actually really quite proud of these photographs and, for the first time, I don't mind admitting it! So, how did I do?

Selling Yourself

Just last week I met with a friend of a friend and her partner to discuss the possibility of photographing their wedding next year. This is my second such meeting and so I felt a little bit more confident and comfortable about what I was going to say. 

So far, I've kept these sort of meetings informal and they have involved a get together over dinner, first just to chat and see how we all get along before getting down to the nitty gritty of showing off my work to date and discussing the ins and outs of what I would do. 

I'm 31 years old and all this showing off my work to strangers is a very new experience for me. In 20 years, I've developed the habit of being quite secretive about my work, whether it be a poem, a story or a photograph and have always chosen to keep what I have done, or what I am doing, largely to myself. It's only in recent years that I've branched out and started showing some of my stuff to friends and colleagues, so to show my work to complete strangers is an alien concept that still has me turning into a gibbering wreck. 

With this in mind, when I do show my "portfolio", such as it is, to people, I find myself being generally quite modest about it. I've always had a tendency to downplay myself in any given situation, so that sentiment has moved over into these meetings too. The first meeting I had was just me, the potential "clients" and our mutual friend. I never heard anything back from them so I'm assuming they chose not to have me as their photographer. This is fine and perfectly understandable. The decision you make about who will photograph your wedding is an important one and it's a brave couple that chooses to have a non-professional do it. 

However, at this recent meeting, Stu came along with me as, in this case, he was the mutual friend. So there I was, handing over my portfolio and giving my little, modest spiel which involves stressing the fact that I am not a professional photographer by any leap of imagination, that I am strictly an amateur, having only photographed one wedding so far and all the while, Stu was sitting reasonably quietly and letting me get on with it. 

Afterwards he asked me how I felt it went and I decided that, actually, I felt while his friend liked my stuff and would probably say yes in a heartbeat, her partner wasn't so sure. I got the impression that her partner knew her stuff when it came to photography, that she knew exactly what she wanted and probably had certain expectations and that, for one reason or another, I didn't meet those expectations. So yeah, I figured that, while we all got on, I wasn't expecting to hear a "Yes, we'll hire you!" response. I asked Stu what he thought and was surprised at what he had to say. 

I forget his exact words now but maybe he'll enlighten you with those in the comments if he reads this but, basically, he told me off for underselling myself. Apparently I mentioned, more than once, that I was an amateur and he tells me I also stated that I didn't know how to use a camera (which I don't personally recall saying, but hey, we'll agree to disagree on that one!). Now, in my mind, I was trying to get across the point that I am not a professional which, when we're talking about wedding photography, is very important. I don't want to come across as the big I am, only for them to be disappointed with the end result. I would sooner them expect the work of an amateur (yes Stu, that word again, I know how much you hate me calling myself that!) and be pleasantly surprised with the results. 

But I do understand where Stu was coming from and I suppose I should work on selling myself a bit more. It's just that, after so many years, it's going to be a hard habit to break. 

As it turns out, they did get back to me that very same night. And the response? "Yes, we'll hire you!" So, I must be doing something right!

Regret what you have done, not what you haven't.

Never Regret

In my line of work, or my "day job" as it shall heretofore be known, I am faced with the elderly, sick and dying on an almost daily basis. It's funny how, when a person gets to this stage of their lives, they entrust so much in a person like me that they have only known for, at the very most, an hour or two of their lives.

I used to think my day job was about giving these people medical care and trying to keep them alive until they were safely in the hands of the nearest hospital bed but I'm very quickly realising that there is another aspect to my role - the confessional.

To be ill, particularly as you get older, seems to encourage people to reminisce and recap their lives and it's quite common for me to be told at least one lasting regret on the ride to the hospital. 

The most common regrets, as noted by Bronnie Ware in her book "The Top Five Regrets of the Dying" which she noted in her time working with palliative care patients, include such things as losing touch with friends or not nurturing friendships as much as they should have, spending so much more time on career instead of on family, not saying how they felt but instead trying to protect the feelings of loved ones, not being happier with their lives and, finally, not having the courage to live their lives the way they wanted instead of how they were expected to live it. 

What seems abundantly clear to me is that people spend a lot of time regretting things that they have not done and, when I think back to my own regrets, it seems I have fallen into the same trap. I regret not doing my A Levels when I had the chance, I regret not carrying on my education after secondary school and I regret not standing up to school bullies more. 

What I don't regret, however, are some of the things I have done that, in hindsight, I know were incredibly stupid and entirely regrettable. And experience is starting to show me that this seems to be the general consensus. So why is it we stop ourselves from doing something for fear of regretting it later? 

With this thought in mind, I have decided to alter my decision-making process when it comes to opportunities and experiences that are thrown into my path. From now on I will take a moment to stop and think to myself, "Am I likely to regret not doing this?" Because, let's face it, I'm more likely to remember, when I'm lying on my death-bed in years to come, the fact that I didn't do something rather than the fact that I did it and got it spectacularly wrong. 

So what do you regret not doing?

Inksperience

Once upon a time, a few years ago now, I was having a quiet afternoon with a friend with a small amount of money in pocket and no ideas on how to keep us entertained for the afternoon. Suddenly my friend stumbled on an idea...

"Let's get your tongue pierced!" she said. Now, this is something I'd wanted to do for quite some time but had never really had the balls to do so, when she suggested it on a whim, I trusted her judgement and off we went to the piercing shop.

A short while later I was pierced and drooling and feeling very happy with myself. Years later I still have that piercing and, when I notice it's presence, I'm reminded of the moment we decided to go and get it done and that feeling always makes me smile.

For me, it wasn't about being pierced. It wasn't about the prestige or trying to impress people, or even to prove that I could do it. It was about having the experience at all, making that decision to do something and actually experiencing it for myself instead of being told about it by someone else and wistfully wondering "some day...".

That desire to experience things is what keeps me going and is as good as any raison d'être that I can think of and it's for this reason that I want to get a tattoo. Not because I think tattoos are beautiful, not because I think they're cool and certainly not because other people have done it so I should too. I want to be able to experience what it feels like and I want to have the opportunity to regret it or to be proud of what I've done.

And so I'm deciding what to get and making plans to get it done. If you have a tattoo(s), what made you get it and what made you choose the design you got?

Advertising Space

For some time now I've been the owner of a DeviantArt account, where I can show off my photography on a regular basis and even create prints to sell should someone wish to purchase them. But I'm disenchanted. The site is so huge and most people remain unknown and anonymous there.

But what better advertising is there than word-of-mouth and the recommendations of friends? So I figured I should probably show off my work where friends can see it - something that never happened on DeviantArt as it is largely an "artistic community". I decided to use the powers of the social network and, to this end, I have now set up a page on Facebook which friends and family can all access and hopefully recommend to others.

So, if you're reading this blog, get on over there and click that 'like' button pronto!