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I mentioned a few years ago in a conversation with a friend of mine that the reason Joe Paterno hasn’t retired yet is because he’s afraid of the curse of Bear Bryant, who died four weeks after coaching his last game. Looks like my unfortunate prediction is coming true. I honestly believe that he could have been immortal had he been allowed to coach forever because coaching football was his life, but circumstances and events did not unfold that way. For many of these legendary coaches who have spent so much of their lives recruiting, mentoring, teaching and spending time with their athletes, there is not much to life outside of football or basketball or whatever it is they coach.

On the flipside is a guy like Gary Williams who I believed would die on the sidelines while coaching a game. His first marriage ended primarily because his life was basketball, and with his personality and love for the game and his student-athletes, I didn’t see a reason for him to ever retire. However, having remarried in April 2011, and with grandchildren to spend time with, he was able to walk away from the game while he still had something to live for.

Ultimately we choose for ourselves, through the decisions we make, what we are living for, be it money, fame, security, God, or football, but in the end we have only one life to live. What are you living for today, and can that be taken from you?

I’ve been looking into some new (to me) light modifiers, and it just keeps leading me towards studio strobes. I like the flexibility and portability of hotshoe flashes, but at a certain point, I’m gonna need the power and adaptability to various light modifiers that you can only get from studio strobes. Because I’m still probably going to want to be able to carry them on location, I’m leaning towards Alienbees and a Vagabond set. I guess I need to schedule some more shoots and start saving up my pennies.

Are there any hobbies that don’t make you spend all your money?

I’m coming up with a schedule for blogging so that it’s a little less random, and hopefully it doesn’t get neglected so much. It’ll be a little bit of the same, some random stuff I like on the internet, a bit of info about a photo I shot, or something about MD Basketball or fantasy football.

Anyways, as 2011 has come and gone, and 2012 is now here, I took a look at my lightroom folder to see how many photos I had from this year. I don’t download all the photos I shoot into lightroom, but my workflow now consists of all the photos I work on being brought into lightroom initially, so basically it’s pretty much my first round of culling photos from what I’ve shot. There are a few duplicates, and plenty that shouldn’t have made it through, but in all I have 11,146 photos from 2011 or 30.54 photos per day. Even just quickly scanning through them, I can see I’ve learned a lot about photography this past year, but I’ve still got a long way to go. Pretty cool to see all the things I’ve worked on, maybe if I can set aside some time, I’ll put together a little portfolio of my work from 2011, but let’s be honest, that’s probably not gonna happen. Partly because I’m lazy, but mostly because I’m too critical of my work and hate looking at my earlier stuff.

I’ve got some exciting ideas for 2012, and hopefully I’ll be able to accomplish one or two.

Christmas is coming up

Last week I had 2 exams and then this past weekend was a whirlwind of photography: I shot 8 different assignments between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, so I didn’t have time to eat or breathe, let alone work on anything. Looks like tomorrow is a gonna be a fun day of editing/submitting everything that I’ve procrastinated on.

Anyways, I got to shoot my first engagement session on Saturday for Nick and Eileen. Nick is a friend of mine from elementary school, and even though life has taken us all over the place, we’ve managed to keep in touch. When I heard he got engaged, I decided to send him a message to see if he was interested in letting me practice on him. One thing led to another, and next thing I new, I was headed out to Southern Maryland this past Saturday. I’ve just barely downloaded the images, and hoping that they’re at least exposed correctly, but here’s one that caught my eye.