Sep
06
2013“Comparison is the thief of joy.” Theodore Roosevelt
I’m visiting a ton with a dear friend this week. I’m so thankful to be here. But there’s always that temptation to peer into her life and wish it were mine.
Comparison can thieve joy. And this week, I’m not going to let it rob me. I’m going to revel in our moments and just enjoy the grace of sharing them.
When You Stop Comparing and Start Living your One Beautiful Life
What if we all linked hands and elbows, and sat on the curb of life, and brushed away each other’s tears, and squeezed each other’s hands, and cheered wildly when it went well, and cried a hot mess when it all fell apart, when there was “trouble in paradise.” What if we did that?
What if we sat at the curb, and we curbed our comparing?
Aug
23
2013
It’s been a little over a month since I raised my prices to a place that will allow me to bring home a salary equivalent to the value and time spent on my work. I want to tell you, that’s been a scary leap for me. It’s still scary.
I’ve booked a couple of St. Louis Lifestyle Family Mini-Sessions in this time, but nothing else. 4-8 people contact me a week and usually disappear after receiving more information even after great phone calls. I’m standing in the gap between making a scary decision that is right for our family, and seeing the fruition of years of hard work.
It’s a scary place to be: waiting. This pregnant anticipation between a dream conceived and a dream realized while waiting under the mercy of a sovereign God.
And that’s where I am right now: trying to hold on to contentment in a season of waiting on the Lord to move.
Here are some great links that have really spoken to me this week about waiting and dreams.
Hope and Your God-Sized Dream
Let’s be real; honest.
Let’s let go of regret and forgive ourselves.
Let’s run towards intelligent people who emulate the life we want to live.Let’s be intentional in friendship so that community happens.
Let’s set aside our egocentric hours to serve someone else.
Let’s run into the Scriptures to learn the lessons we need to.This is hope chasing. This is my dream. Will you join me?
~Nasreen Fynewever
When You’re Ready to Wear who You Really Are
Just like Eve, we women tend to spend more time analyzing what we are not or what we don’t have than recognizing who we were created to be. Satan’s victory with Eve started way before she ate that fruit.
The bite was only the culmination.
Eve’s demise began when she entered a conversation with the devil. And that’s what we do a lot. We talk. We rehearse on a daily basis what we don’t have or who we are not. We focus on the areas of our “garden” (our domain or our realm) that seem just out of our reach or control.
We take the seed of discontentment offered by the evil one and inform our souls of our dissatisfaction, unhappiness, or displeasure.
Just like Eve we have a choice.
~Chrystal Hurst
Save the Date
Waiting can be a type of resistance when you have something you’re passionate about. You imagine something, get motivated to do it, make a few plans. But then you hit a wall because this one part isn’t clear yet or that other part doesn’t make sense yet. And so you wait and imagine and have a long list of if only’s.
And it’s possible that somewhere in the waiting, you begin to realize how nice it is to have a dream but not have to do anything about it.
Maybe you’re waiting because it’s easier than doing the work.
~Emily Freeman
Aug
17
2013I don’t know about you, but there are days where I’m so worn out I don’t think I can do one more thing. I need rest.
5 Steps to Finding Quiet in a Noisy World
It’s a balance – living in a digital world and still needing those simple quiet moments. It’s possible. But, it’s also intentional. Purposeful. And well worth it.
A wise friend of mine says that this lie is a dangerous one because every time we tell ourselves we should be doing “more,” it leads to less…
Rest by Downhere
Just this truth.
Aug
02
2013I haven’t done any photography specific links for the weekend yet. So this is a little extra credit work for those of you who want to learn how to get better exposures.
Your Camera’s Best Kept Secret
I totally think this post is going to help those of you who are more visual. It’s a combination post covering both exposure and in-camera metering.
Nailing Exposure
Love the style of writing on this. Informative and funny. And she explains so well what I tried to explain in our exposure compensation post. Figure out where your camera makes exposure fall for your tastes and adjust up or down the correct number of stops (or third stops) to get images looking the way your imagine.
One Camera Setting & It’s Impact on your Pictures
So you’re doing everything right, testing your lighting, looking at your image on your LCD screen, changing your setting accordingly, and then making sure you nailed it on your LCD again. A few hours later your upload to the computer and wonder where on earth your nice pictures went?! This might just be a setting you need to change.
Jul
26
2013I’m on the phone with a client.
“The only thing I’m not sure about is being in pictures with my newborn.”
Honestly, this conversation is one I have with just about every client I book, but especially for newborn sessions. I smile gently and I beg these moms to get in the photo. I whisper how I know that the post-postpartum body is just different and new and hard. I tell them that I use angles and poses that minimize that awkward and fragile season. But mostly I tell them: relationship is what matters. Your child will want to see how much you loved them from the beginning.
I never have had a mom regret that I begged them to get into the picture.
So this week’s links are a series of great posts on why you should get in the picture, even when your hair is messed up or you’re 10 pounds overweight or you hate the way you smile.
Beauty
“We work so hard to be good role models to our daughters, and here we are-regularly-teaching them that our words mean nothing, that when push comes to shove, it is the outer beauty that is the most important.”
When Your Mother Says She’s Fat
“Now I understand what it’s like to grow up in a society that tells women that their beauty matters most, and at the same time defines a standard of beauty that is perpetually out of our reach. I also know the pain of internalizing these messages. We have become our own jailors and we inflict our own punishments for failing to measure up. No one is more cruel to us than we are to ourselves.”
The Mom Stays in the Picture
“I’m everywhere in their young lives, and yet I have very few pictures of me with them. Someday I won’t be here — and I don’t know if that someday is tomorrow or thirty or forty or fifty years from now — but I want them to have pictures of me. I want them to see the way I looked at them, see how much I loved them. I am not perfect to look at and I am not perfect to love, but I am perfectly their mother.”
