…..is the enormous energy of small moments.

Wow…. Can’t believe I’ve not made a post in so long….

I’ve simply been almost nonexistent for a year or so on the social media aspect of running a photography business. It took me awhile to understand that it literally doesn’t matter…. If you’re good you’re going to be fully-booked and if you’re not good your business will die and no amount of social media is going to alter that truth.

With no advertising, no social media updates, no website updates and no outreach, we continue to say “No” multiples more often than we say “Yes”, simply because we’re fully-booked.

The business essentially runs itself at this point. Word-of-Mouth is our top form of advertising, which includes shooting weddings for folks we met while shooting OTHER weddings! Add to that DJs and videographers and wedding planners, etc., recommending us, and it’s allowed the time-saving luxury of not needing social media updates.

I’m going to steer the business toward a new horizon in mid-2025, but, until then, we’re likely the photographers you’re going to see at the next South-Central Indiana wedding that you attend!

Photography is such a (cruel?) (ironic?) (maddening?) (bewildering?) (ever-elusive?) (constantly-moving?) art form.

There’s a near 100% certainty that X-amount of time after I take every picture I’ll be dismayed that I thought it looked great in real-time.

Photographers evolve. We adapt. And grow and change and improve.

What gave us personal and professional peace last year or 10 years ago may not meet our standards for this year. And so on.

I wish I could do an alternate universe 2023-me re-shoot of every client I’ve photographed since 2014. It would be an enriching experiment. Every single image would look different. To me, they’d look much better.

I always love to hear recording artists reinterpret their songs, years later, for example. The songs sound both familiar and, more often than not, better. Related, I also love watching films a second/third/fourth time after 10 or 20 years…. So much is familiar, and so much is changed — not from the content, but from our view of the content.

Maybe art simply flows. Perhaps there is no finish line. Possibly our tastes/views/preferences/standards are simply flowing, and are ever-altered by experience and circumstances and influences. Conceivably, a painting seen in 1980 exists solely as a painting in 1980, and isn’t meant in any way to compare to how that same painting looks upon a return visit to the same museum in 2025.

I’m striving to feel about photography as I may feel about a peaceful, meaningful moment of solitude — to appreciate the it for the it, and to realize that sometimes that’s (full stop and with gratitude) enough.

I enjoy spending an hour with folks, one-on-one, talking about their lives and their hopes/dreams/plans.

I enjoy being able to give them meaningful images from our time together.

I enjoy knowing I sprinkled good in the soil of Planet Earth, client-by-client.

Some people have a magic to them. An enormous aura of goodness and intelligence and grace and possibilities….

Korlu is one of them.

To enable those around her to experience her exuberance and joyful spirit…. What a rare, uplifting soul…..

I love doing good work for good people in a good community.

I’ve known for a year or two that I’d alter the course of our business in time, and this week took a few significant steps toward that anticipated transition.

We’re essentially fully-booked already for the remainder of 2023 — how crazy is that — but I’ve nonetheless fully deleted from the website any link to, and examples of, weddings, engagements, portrait sessions, senior pictures and graduation sessions. We officially won’t schedule any more of those type sessions going forward.

Rather than being a full-service photography business, we’ll dramatically shift to offering solely professional headshots and commercial photography.

I love both commercial and headshot photography, and am excited in this — our 10th year in business — to focus on only those two genres, exclusively.

Still quite a bit of tweaking to do on the website to best reflect the updates, but I’ll get to that next….

Downsizing is, paradoxically, though with some sadness in letting go, uplifting.

No question that one of the most important parts of a portrait session is to help make each person 100% comfortable. Relaxed and natural and “yourself” in front of a camera doesn’t come easily for most folks, and it’s the photographer’s responsibility to help in any/every way.

When the moment hits, though, all the preliminary nudging sure pays off!

I love pictures that are completely natural and that bring me a smile — both as I’m actually shooting them and later as I’m looking at them on my desktop.

I was driving home, early Sunday morning through Bakersfield, listening to gospel music on the colored radio station…

Me, too, Keith/Mick. Me, too…. Hat’s off.

And hat’s off too, to Mark Twain, The Loneliest Road in America, Great Basin, Pinnacles, King’s Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, cool towns, kindnesses of strangers, chance encounters, Antelope Canyon, nostalgia, Buddy Holly, free time, perseverance, underserved miracles and wide open spaces/wide open minds.

In the midst of another month-long road trip, and can’t comprehend how amazing it is to explore interesting place after interesting place after interesting place….

Two-lane roads. Three cameras in the car. An eye toward wonder and a heart filled with joy….