Resolutions and "The Pile"

New Year Resolutions – do you make them? Do any of them involve pictures? Something like … I’m going to take more, do something with them, back them up, find them, make a scrapbook, open ‘the box’ of photos my parents gave me, etc. I struggle just like everyone else. I used to take pictures 24 at a time, with my awesome SLR camera. I remember waiting at CVS or Target or Wolf Camera for the developed prints. Now I take pictures 100’s at a time. This is one of the BEST parts of our new digital world. I can see right away if I got the shot, and if I can’t I just keep shooting in the hopes that out of the 100’s I’ll get a few good ones. (There is usually at least one good one once I have a chance to look at them!) The challenge is that instead of figuring out how to deal with 24 prints (or 48 with doubles!) and negatives, I have 100’s of photographs to deal with. Sometimes all that means is that I get them moved on to my computer. Sometimes I am able to organize them and tag them. Sometimes they get put into the pile for ‘later’. There are months (let’s be honest here – years) that the ‘later’ pile wins.

I don’t make resolutions for the new year--instead I adopt the Word of the Year approach that I learned from Christine Kane. This year’s word is ‘PLAN’. Everything, for me, seems to be less stressful and more smooth when I plan, whether I’m talking about what I eat, getting to the gym, or even enjoying my photographs. So this coming week, amongst everything else on my calendar, I’ve planned two things. One of them is that I will spend 1 hour sorting through as many of the digital photos on the ‘later’ pile as I can make a dent in, and 1 hour making something with them (probably summary pages for a year in review digital book). The other thing I planned to do is write this post to share that you don’t have to be overwhelmed. If you want some advice about where to start, give me a call. If you want some help getting it done, give me a call.

(Now I can check off one of those things – I LOVE the feeling of checking off items on my to-do list!)