Eight days a week. Meet my gentleman. I’m training him in front of the camera. Breaking the ice with these rookie shots. :)

I received my first order from NORWAY today – I’m now at 231 sales. And this is with virtually no promotional effort apart from this blog and a little bit of Facebook and Twitter – it’s all I have time for! I do wish I had more time for promotional activities because this has great potential for explosion. A friend of mine suggested that I make a big “P” (for Precious) out of flags from countries who’ve bought my art. What a brilliant idea. I’m on it!

I’m back from my weekend getaway – it was a beautiful time. Forgive me for missing my Friday and Saturday posts – I didn’t even bring my laptop with me. I just wanted to focus on face time without distractions.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again – if you make your weekends eventful, it makes it a lot easier to go back to another work week, so make something out of your weekends!

Also, I saw The Decades Show this weekend for an evening entertainment and they were absolutely phenomenal. I love, love, LOVE talented people. I just want to hug them and tell them how awesome they are.

On another note, a little bit of Mark Twain brilliance:
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

Surround yourself with genuine well-wishers and people who bring you UP to higher places because there is just no room for the alternative!

Hope you all had a weekend as fabulous as mine. xo

I packaged these today and realized that I’ve never taken a photo of my packaging all this time, so voila! The quality of my wrapping job does vary from day to day and some are better than others – these ones are mediocre, so don’t pass too much judgment! One’s going to California, the other to Calgary. Some ask why I spend so much time on packaging; it seems like a waste of effort. It absolutely isn’t and I can’t help it because I’m in Marketing and I’m a little obsessed with details. Packaging matters and I will take the extra time to wrap my prints all pretty (but absolutely protective and functional) before I send them out. The handwritten thank you card is the final touch – extra warm and fuzzies and appreciation never hurt anyone. :) What makes it all worth it? The 206 100% positive feedback at my Etsy Shop from my customers, the extra spending money generated that enables me to save more, and the rewarding emotion I feel every time I receive a sale because just like that, my art found itself a home in someone’s life. Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for letting me do what I love.

I am away at a cottage this weekend and may or may not be able to post, depending on wifi accessibility. I will try. :)

I wrote twenty letters to twenty special people last Christmas and snail-mailed them. I think I’ll do that again one of these days, for no reason other than to write heartfelt letters to each and every angel in my life who I am so grateful to know and have. My treasure box of cherished relationships is growing every year and it’s a blessing to continuously cross paths with those who have the power to inspire and positively influence you in all these different ways. Every now and then, I hit a wall of realization: that I have relationships with seriously great individuals and I feel a sudden forceful urge to show appreciation whether it’s through a random text message, phone call, Facebook wall post, or voicemail. I’m a lucky girl in so many ways and I know it and I’m so grateful.

“Light glorifies everything. It transforms and ennobles the most commonplace and ordinary subjects. The object is nothing, light is everything.” -Leonard Missone

Someone loves light as much as I do. It IS everything. You know what though – I’ve completely forgotten about my external flash, which does come in handy indoors. The photo below was shot right on my bed using the external flash and I am completely pleased with the outcome. The flash was a $500 investment rotting away in a drawer because I never learned how to use it properly – I still don’t know how to use it. It was one of those impulse purchases when I first got into photography and had to have everything under the sun, thinking that the more equipment I had, the better photos I could take.

Wrong.

All I ever wander around with today is my camera, my portrait lens, my zoom lens, and my wide angle lens. I don’t care about anything else and don’t really need anything else except for a macro lens perhaps, which I need to save up for (among a hundred other things I’m saving for). Half of the recipe is my equipment and the other half is the post processing work in Adobe Photoshop – to me, that’s where the ‘creation’ takes place. The snapping of the photo requires ‘the eye’ so that you see beauty in all the ordinary things in life, then post processing the photo is the ‘painting’ of your complete vision, breathing personality and style into it.

Photographers and all lovers of this art form, this photo is available as an 8×10 print at my Etsy Shop. Come shop or support. :)

That’s commitment. I left my MacBook charger at my boyfriend’s place and of course batteries magically drained itself in my bag and is conveniently dead so that I can’t turn my laptop on. Worse yet, I took a new photo to post for today and now it can’t be posted. Murphy’s (stupid) Law.

Luckily, I was at a Laundromat this weekend and snapped an Instagram photo of the laundry machines with my iPhone. It’ll do for now. I’ve always wanted to do a photoshoot in a Laundromat but never got around to it, so then the one time that I was in one, I didn’t have my camera with me of course.

Anyway, the photo quality on the iPhone 4S is certainly impressive.

to want nothing, to expect nothing, to depend on nothing.”

Just returned from a wonderful brunch triple date downtown on this BEAUTIFUL Winter Saturday. It’s beautiful because the sun is shining, the skies are blue with just the perfect amount of puffy white clouds, and it’s pleasantly warm for a day in January.

I’m trying to start a CARS series. It’s just really hard in the Winter when the sun comes and goes in a blink. My style of photography thrives in natural light. I hate indoor photography – especially because I don’t have a lighting kit to somewhat remedy this hatred and I end up resorting to table lamps, which gives me dysfunctional and unbalanced lighting at best, so then I shoot at a higher ISO and end up with grainy photos. Basically, I hate indoor photography. And winter. :) I’m not a huge fan of this photo but it’s getting posted because the rule is A Photo A Day. I’ve posted a number of not-so-hot photos on this blog in the last two years if you are at all interested in seeing some embarrassing work:

Like this one. (I even called it lame right on the post itself. And surprise, surprise! It was taken during the Winter of 2010.)

And this one. (Brutal.)

And this one. (Once upon a time, I liked taking weird and ‘dark’ photos.)

Anyway, the sun on the other hand, inspires me in every way possible. I feel happy just seeing sunlight and even more so when I feel the heat beating on my skin. I know that Winter just started but I can’t wait for the Spring.

“Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other. But never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.” –Seth Godin’s The Dip

How true is that? Quit the wrong stuff and stick with the right stuff and don’t quit on the right stuff. It’s simple.

Remember when I said I had post cards to list on my Etsy Shop? I think that was a good two months ago. I need to take actual product and packaging shots for the shop but here’s at least a sneak peek of what they look like.