In my last post I mentioned how much progress I have been making on a lot of my goals, so I thought I might elaborate a bit on what those goals are and what has been keeping me busy. I still won’t be able to get into the details in this post, but I’ll lay things out in a little more detail here and try to outline some of the specific activities in future posts.

Being a glass-half-full kind of guy, I have been trying to use my time to my best advantage, and have developed what I call a three-pronged approach. I have every hope of jumping back into a banking job soon, so I have made a list of things that I want to accomplish so if I end up with only a few more weeks off I can feel like the time was well spent. Understandably a lot of my activities have been centered on photography, since that is my passion, but also being a realist I know that there are other things to take care of as well. My activities have centered around the main topics of (1) finding a new job, (2) catching up on and furthering my photography and (3) taking care of me.

As far as finding a new job, I have set up a list of contacts and have been working them regularly. I set up a system of checking websites and applying for jobs I find there, and I have been working any contacts of contacts I come across. Once my severance runs out I’ll have to jump on the Unemployment bandwagon, and there will be a certain amount of work associated with that. Like everything I do, I go 100% on the job search stuff in the time I have allotted for it. I have a system and a routine and I do it. Nothing scientific, but in this economy there isn’t a lot of point trying to spend more than a few hours a week trying to find banking jobs, because there aren’t a lot of new ones being posted and there are more productive things to do than check the same websites 5 times a day. Chances are whatever job I land won’t come from surfing websites anyway, so while it’s something you “have to do” the contacts are the most likely source of success.

I’ve had photography goals for a long time, and have developed a pretty elaborate system for laying them out and keeping track of my progress. When I was working a Day Job I really had to be careful to not try and accomplish too many things, because it is tough to do as a part-time venture. Despite the fact that I was putting a lot of time into it I was often frustrated by all the things I wanted to do that I didn’t have time to do while working a full time job. The main thing holding me back has been that there is barely enough time for taking and processing photos, let alone all the business things that you really need to do in order to have a successful photography business. What has amazed me over the last several weeks is how little time I have actually spent taking and processing photos! I’ve been networking, I put together a submission for a juried art show, I’m working on another submission for another art show, I’ve submitted a number of images to various magazines (many of them successful!) and have for the first time registered my images with the Copyright Office. I’m writing an article/tutorial on how to use Lightroom to prepare images for copyright registration, I have a couple of critique/review sessions coming up with pro photographers, and I’m in the process of developing a marketing and business plan for a photography business in the event that the banking thing doesn’t work out. I’m working with our local REI store on doing a paid workshop on Lightroom & Digital Workflow, am leading an outing for our local CNPA chapter for this fall and I am looking to expand my marketing of my stock portfolio and magazine submissions. I want to work on my writing and am hoping to take some writing classes at the local community college. Oh yeah, I also need to take and process more images and write more on my blog!

The “taking care of me” part is not just me personally, but taking over some of the things at home so Kathy doesn’t feel like I am just sitting at home “playing photographer.” I have been walking every day – 45 minutes or 1.5/2 miles, working on getting some long-overdue maintenance projects done around the house, running errands, making phone calls and generally taking a lot of the burden off of Kathy since she is gone all day. It’s hard on her and I have been trying to ease the load as much as I can. The nice thing is that since I don’t have to spend all evening working on my photo stuff, I can be with her and we can do things that are relaxing instead of trying to play catch up.

In a nutshell, that’s where I am and what I have been doing. I’ve got a lot on the calendar for this week and am hoping for some more progress. As I process more images I’ll have some fresh ones to post, but in the mean time I’ll keep digging into the archives!