Hey. I thought I’d let you guys know that I have yet again updated my DeviantArt site with yet another photo of my old roomy Ben J. Just click the image below to go there and see it in it’s full size web form.

In a heated conversation the other night with Ben S. the topic of callings came up. Well more specifically prayer for signs of callings and a few other topics unnecessary to address at the moment. Believe it or not folks, I pray. That’s right the guy that makes more jokes about people’s posteriors than remotely necessary, believes in God (the Christian one) and even makes it a point to pray often. More often than not, I tend to pray for forgiveness for my sins and for those of the people I love. I pray for safety and protection from all harm and evil. I pray to be a better person…to be more like Jesus and less like myself. I pray usually until I fall asleep. It’s a good thing for subconscious, or I fear that God might not make sense of my prayers since I commonly fall asleep in the middle. My faith…not my faith in God, but my faith as in the sect of Christianity I have chosen to adhere to puts a great deal of emphasis on predetermined destiny. My faith, by the way is Presbyterian and one step further in classification makes it Presbyterian USA. At this point, I have digressed. My intention was not to write about all the subdivisions in the religion of Christianity, but to talk a little bit more about the signs I’ve been praying for.

I think I may have received a sign today. Well, last night, but it took today for me to waken to it. For almost a decade now I’ve wanted to be a photographer. I realize that the kind of photography I am interested in is not the kind that one makes a living off of. It’s not the kind of thing that I go and apply for a position in. The good thing about that is that I can keep any regular job I have and work on my photography in the evenings and on the weekends, until one day I can survive off of it alone. That certainly takes persistence though. Get to the point a-hole. Well, last night I received a message from my mom stating that someone had called her house and left a message stating that the person had met me while I was shooting a wedding several years ago, and wanted to get in touch with me to shoot for one of her clients. That “you never know” networking paid off just a little even though it’s been years since I talked to this person. No, that’s not the sign but is a part of it. This morning when I checked my email, I had an email sent last night from a representative of Time magazine letting me know that a piece of my stock had been chosen for their bilingual Chinese publication of Time for Students Magazine. The photo that was chosen is a somewhat popular photo that many companies have used since I posted it to the free stock site I am a member of. The odd part about this is that these two messages occurred within 15 minutes of each other. Now I don’t consider that a sign in itself. I consider it smiled upon coincidence. I think it was a reminder that the sign has been there all along. Most people know that I am very hard on myself…to the point that instead of self-criticism positively affecting me, I end up settling into thinking I don’t deserve better or some inane bullshit like that. I have been overcome with emails for the past year or so requesting permission for photography releases, but I haven’t really taken anything to heart. I thought, “wow, that’s cool” and that’s about it. When people hear that I didn’t finish my degree, they assume I partied too hard and failed out of college. The truth is, I couldn’t afford it anymore, and the timing was bad with some other personal issues at the time. I’ve been telling myself that I can’t be a decent photographer with the equipment I have, and I need to buy light kits and drop-paper and who knows what else. Though I’d love to have those things, and eventually will; I am finally taking heed of my own advice to so many. The advice of course is the same old cliché’ advice of “it doesn’t matter if it’s a Fender or an Ibanez…if Brian May is playing it, it’ll still sound amazing”. The odd thing is, that this photo has been used in presentations, as a cover for a novel, on band CD covers, you name it it’s been there. It has been downloaded for use over 1500 times and it still took someone asking for my address to send a Time Magazine tear sheet to for me to realize that good photography has far less to do with equipment or degrees, and everything to with the person behind the camera. Now I don’t mean this as some petty gloat or anything like that. It just feels good to finally realize that I have nothing to prove to anyone by not having a degree that says I know how to take pictures. I am certainly not the best and never will be…a lot of the time my good shots are luck. However, I know what I want and I have been given a good sign to stop thinking I suck at everything and to start making things work for me. I won’t get any money off this Time Magazine thing because the photo is part of a free stock site, but I guarantee that more of my work will be submitted to some stock agencies and less to popularity contests like DeviantArt and the site the photo was taken from. Don’t get me wrong, there are some great shots on DeviantArt, but the bulk of the people there are there to talk trash and post it too.

Sorry for the long and somewhat incoherent post, but I am somewhat pleased. I am the most unlikely person to claim I am a Christian. You can ask me bible study questions and I won’t know the answers. You can claim that I am a follower of the most contradictory religion there is…I would agree with you. I can tell you that I don’t base my religion on the Bible or churches, or rituals. I am a Christian because I believe not only in the principles (not the literal words) taught by some of those books of the Bible, but also because I believe in Jesus Christ and his/our father God. I believe in God and he believes in me.

I promise this is clearer in my head and needs the work of a copy editor. El, you want to work on this for me?

It’s late. Goodnight.

I am tired of the old carrots and spinach dots, and am slowly working my way back to my color scheme. This is a blogger template, but I will hopefully start putting in my own stuff for my own template.

As for my lack of blogging in general? I have been pretty happy with my personal life, and I tend not to post when I am happy, so I guess it’s a good thing. However, I do feel the urge to write…I just draw blanks. Thus, I am considering a new style of blogging for me along with this visual change. We’ll see I guess.

Toodles.

It’s also Garrett’s birthday, so Happy Birthday Gee! His blog is no longer active, but his band sure is.

…click the pic to see the latest updates at my deviantart.com site.