A month of gratitude

In an effort to blog all month for national blogging month and to change my grumpiness that has seem to be poking around a little more, I am going to journal daily about what I am grateful for.

Today, I am thankful for my clients and my job:

I have had a camera since I was 5 and my dad would take me to the Base's dark rooms when he went to develop his own film. Later he took pictures for "March of Dimes" to make a little extra money. We have a file cabinet filled with photos from my childhood and a bunch more in albums and on walls. In high school I took 2 years of photography, learning to develop film and prints and had the best teacher in my whole school career. Mr. Pinto was a bit of a hippie, he would play good oldies over the speaker system while we worked, stuff like Creedance Clearwater Revival and Strawberry Alarm Clock. He'd bring donuts to sell in class for a little extra photo club money. He'd hold parties in class every so often just for the heck of it. I made him a big goofy hat for his birthday one year and he wore it often!

It took me awhile to decide to do this professionally. There's a very talented couple I go to church with that are also pro photogs, but they deal mostly with weddings (from what I can tell and they are very good at it.) I just couldn't fathom actually using the full darkroom I had in my garage while raising 2-3 kiddos. Being in a darkroom can take so much time. When I got my first digital SLR camera, a new world opened to me. I no longer had to wait for perfect child-free time to get into a darkroom, I could now work in the office, with the little ones running in and out and interact with them as well!

I love what I do because I get to use a lot of my talents at once. I can use my artistic side, digitally paint and collage, create scrapbooking type elements for cards and announcements, and play with kiddos! It makes me so happy to be able to work, work from home, and be creative while doing it.