Focus on Life

I know that my recent posts have been scattered from topic to topic. I am trying to work on finding the content that I want to write about but, also keep it entertaining for my readers. At the beginning of this year I told myself that I was going to dust off my blog which I hadn't really kept up with since college and I was going to post once a week. As you can tell that hasn't really happened this year. When I revamped my blog with a new look and a name I thought that it was going to be easy for me to keep up with.

My intentions for the year 2012 was to take a simple word and focus on that throughout the year. Sounds easy enough right? I thought that I chose a word that was suited me well and something that I could play around with. I chose the word "focus." This word pretty much sums me up in many ways. The first reason why this word came to mind was because I am a photographer. I like to think of myself as a pretty good photographer but, I will leave that up to you all to decide.

One of my favorite shots from a recent child session. 

The Blue Angels came to perform at the Little Rock Air Force Base.

I also thought that the word focus would be easy to always come up with ideas to write about for the simple fact that I wanted to use this years to look back over the last few years and focus on how far I have come. This last year a lot of amazing and some not so amazing things have happened. 

A few of the good things:

• I celebrated my 5 year wedding anniversary with the best man that I could ask for. 
• I landed a job in my desired career path. 
• I started riding a motorcycle! At first I was pretty terrified  but, now you can't keep me off!
• I volunteer with the local animal shelter by taking photos of all of the animals so, we have good photos to post and hopefully get them adopted. 
• I have gotten really involved with the local Bikers Against Child Abuse Chapter. 

A few of the bad things:

• My husband got t-boned by semi that totaled out the car (Thankfully he was able to walk away from the accident)
• My husband had knee surgery in January and his boss wouldn't give him more than one day off so, I ended up driving him to work for a few days since, he was still on pain medication. 
• I had to have surgery in April that took me out of work for over two weeks and here it is September and I am still trying to heal! 
• My husband lost his job the week of my surgery and searched for 6 weeks before landing a minimum wage job. 

I think I will leave this list at that... sadly I could go on but, I like that the positive things outnumber the negatives. 2012 has proven to not be a very good year. Even though there were rough times I try to focus on all of the good things that have happened. 

I am going to work on trying different ways to play off of my word I chose at the beginning of the year.

Have you ever chosen a word to life by? if so, what was your word and were you able to keep up with it?

Click Happy!

In what little spare time I can find I spend time reading one of my friends blogs. Most of the time I am at work on my lunch break eating with one hand and scrolling with the other. A few days ago there was a post that I could really relate to. The topic of her post was taking photos. Photography is a major passion of mine so, this post was right up my alley.

"I have this habit when I photograph things. I’ll snap about 400 photos of something, and then I’ll open them up and really look at them. I may adjust the lighting, I may tweak them, and I’ll go through and delete every photo that just doesn’t… work. If there’s a blurry patch, it’s gone. If there’s poor lighting, it’s gone."  - DigitalEraMom.com

I don't think I could have typed those words any better than she did. I spent a few years taking photography classes in college and learning how to take the perfect photo with the perfect lighting with the perfect subject with the perfect focus. There are just times that it is near impossible to capture all of those perfect things needed for the perfect photo in a single shot. Yes, you can take multiple shots throw them into Photoshop and spend a few hours tweaking things until they are just right. But there is no better feeling than snapping a photo and bringing it up on the computer screen and it looking amazing straight from the camera.

I there there are times that I am more critical of my own work than others are. This past weekend I had been hurting really bad due to a little bit of a relapse from a surgery I had back in April but, I was tired of being in the house. A friend had reminded me that the air show was in town. We were able to take our own chairs so, that worked perfectly for me. I was able to go outside and enjoy myself where I didn't have to stand the whole time.

My friend and I headed over to the Air Force Base and after 45 long minutes we were finally being directed into a field to park in that was across the base of the entrance to the air show. They loaded us up on school buses to drop us off at the main gate. I couldn't remember the last time I had been on a school bus. I didn't remember how tall those steps where! After we finally made it to entrance we decided to walk around a few minutes before we found a spot to set up our chairs.

I am a huge Dale Earnhardt Jr. fan so being about to stand beside his car made my day. Of course his car was next to the National Guard recruitment booth. 

But back to my main point of this post. As I was going through all my photos from the air show I took 386 photos and I ended up only sharing 19 of them. This lines right up with what DigitalEraMom was talking about. My professional side of me comes on very strong when I am editing photos and now there are over 350 photos from the air show that are just siting on my external hard drive.

Here is a sampling of the photos I posted on my Facebook Loggins Photography and Design:

Do you take 100's of photos and only use a limited amount?

Be sure to surf on over to www.digitaleramom.com and check out her blog.