HIGH-WOOTNESS-FIVE! (HW5!)
HW5! to Melissa Reed Smith – she’s getting busy with a to-do list & doing some re-prioritization. Wootness!
HOW’S THAT LIST LOOKING?
1. Handle mail the day it arrives.
2. Keep a running bank deposit prepared.
3. Clear out your inbox on a daily basis. Unsubscribe from any emails that arrive on a daily basis. (Except for Wootness!)
4. 50% of work day devoted to backlog
ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JANE A DULL GIRL
You’ve worked hard all week, so let’s treat ourselves a bit. You didn’t become a photographer to sit in your office all dang day. Get away from the desk, grab the camera and go shoot. Do you have a pet project that you’ve let slide because there were more vital things to be done? It’s all fine and good to re-prioritize and set a plan to get organized and stay that way, but if you don’t allow for any time to be creative – the passion you have for photography will suffer. So – Today, Spend 25% of your workday on backlog and then step away from the desk. Go shoot. Drop me an email and tell me what you’re working on.
I have a digital image competition next weekend and the deadline for entries is looming. This is the last day to work on entries before they need mailed in. I’ve had so much other stuff going on that I let this slide. I did a creative shoot today and got an image from it that I really like. I also pulled out 3 past images from shoots I’ve done this past 6 months or so.
They’re all ready to take down to the Post Office. *whew!*
TAKE A RISK
We all know what our strong areas are. Mine are in-studio portraits. When entering competition, I never enter a non-studio print. However. I have an image I took of my father-in-law the day before my mother-in-law passed away. I had my camera with me that day and took 6 random photos. Little did we know that these would be the last photos of my mother-in-law.
Anyway – There’s one of my father-in-law that I really like. I’d be breaking one of the 12 Elements of Wootness if I entered it. I have an explicit rule not to enter photos of family memebers or images that I have become emotionally invested in. You’re asking for trouble. This time I broke that rule twice. I also entered a photo of a grandchild.
So, you know what? I’m going to stop playing it safe – just for a little bit. I think I have 4 pretty solid entries, so I’m going to enter the image of my father-in-law and see what happens. It was shot in a very low-light situation at probably 1600ISO. But I think the grittiness of the image reflects the mood in the house that day. Of course, that could just be me having a marshmallow moment.
TODAY I:
- Creative Shoot
- Prepped 5 images for competition
- Cleared email
- Worked on backlog