The End of 2012

Growing Up : Prints Available

It’s that time of year again. Many photographers are sharing their favorite images from 2012, and while I think that looking back at the past year and picking out your favorite images is a cool tradition and all, I’m never very good at picking out favorites, so it’s not something I often do. Typically, when I look back at a year photographically, I always feel like I did so little and ought to have gone out shooting more.

2012 has been full of ups and downs, as many of you who regularly read my blog could probably decipher pretty easily. It started with trying to desperately wrap up my final semester of grad school amid traveling to Haiti and Costa Rica, then fell into a sobering summer where I was determined to take time away from work and responsibility to just focus on recovering from the past couple years of little sleep and much stress. Following that, I was bored and broke, so I found some purpose in teaching and, as usual, I landed myself an erratic schedule filled with part time jobs based in various states to ensure that doing my taxes at the end of the year would be borderline impossible. I scraped by, hung on, loved hard, and was plenty foolish. I had beautiful moments, some filled with smiles, some with tears, many with both. I met new people, made new friends, and found inspiration from the completely random people I met on my travels. I even started to think about photography very differently than I have in the past. 2012 unraveled not exactly in the way I might have expected it would, but fortunately a good friend once told me not to have expectations suggesting they were a surefire way to be disappointed. So thanks to him, I was neither disappointed nor surprised by the turns the year took. Life happens, and you’ve just gotta roll with it the best you can.

Cloud Forest

As much as the end of one year is an appropriate time for reflection, the beginning of a new one also seems like an appropriate time to set goals. Photographers have a tradition of doing this too. While New Year’s resolutions notoriously end in failure, it’s still probably good to have a few goals lined up. After all, having goals gives you purpose, something to work towards and strive for.

So I’ve thought about it, and the only goal that really seems worthy of making a goal is the same one I’ve had my whole life. To be fair, it’s probably one of the few goals I’m any good at sticking to. I just want to BE HAPPY. Simple, vague, largely immeasurable, but totally attainable. And 100% worthy.

Choosing the Right Photo Workshop

I often get emails and messages from photographers asking for all sorts of advice. Recently, a photographer I met started asking me about workshops through NatureScapes.Net, the company I work for. A workshop he was particularly interested in had filled for the upcoming year, and he was looking for alternatives, as he didn’t want to wait until the following year visit this particular destination. As he started to send me links to a number of other photo trips to the same country, asking what I thought of them and if they would be good trips, I realized that many aspiring photographers have no idea what to look for when it comes to finding good instructional photography trips.

When I started shooting nature and wildlife in 2006, I was a poor college student and had no interest at all in paying someone to teach me about something I could learn on my own for free, and to this day I’ve still never paid for any photo workshop or event, although I have attended many. I’ve also never been the type to fork over any significant amount of money for anything without carefully researching it first, so I often forget that many others aren’t as cautious. What I’ve discovered is that many photographers sign up for workshops without even the slightest clue of what they are getting themselves into. Sometimes participants just don’t do their homework, but often photographers just don’t know what to look for or what questions to ask.

My newest article, published just today on NatureScapes.Net, is designed to help photographers identify what to look for when choosing a photo workshop or tour. Inspired by the photographer with all of the workshop questions, I wrote it to help photographers avoid ending up on one of the horror story trips I’ve heard too much about. I hope that you’ll find “Choosing the Right Photo Workshop” a valuable resource when deciding on your next paid photo adventure, and that it can help you pick a trip that is right for you.