Northern Voice was this past weekend and Reilly and I both spoke at Photocamp. It’s *so hard* to try to figure out what to possibly cover in 15 minutes, but we settled on lighting and split it up into two tidy packages and put together our stuff.

My presentation on natural lighting was fairly universal - anyone with a camera from point and shoot to full dSLR and gear could probably get something out of it. Conveniently, if you weren’t there, the whole thing complete with slides and video and all has been put up on the web and can be watched online.

Reilly’s presentation is also online and focuses on more advanced flash use and is probably more interesting to the serious amateur or for pros who haven’t spent a lot of time focussing on lighting, but totally worth checking out. That’s here.

What I didn’t anticipate - at all - and what I’m still surprised at - has been the absolute flood of people coming up to us, emailing us, facebooking us and seeking us out to thank us for what we shared. More than one person has told us that one or both of our talks were the absolute highlight of the conference for them, and that is pretty darn humbling. I seriously have no idea how we’ll top it next year. I’m just so excited that so many people found value in what we talked about and can walk away and put something we said into immediate use.

On the this-is-my-personal-blog-and-I’ll-talk-about-myself-if-I-wanna side, I LOVE teaching. I love being the subject matter expert in something. I love being the go-to person for people to ask relevant questions to. It’s probably been the one thing I’ve missed most about the corporate job (strictly the Edmonton side, when I managed the people in tech support) the most.

I’ve picked up some of it in other ways - I love mentoring other photographers and small business owners - but I want to do more. It’s not a God complex - well, it probably is - but I just get so much joy out of helping others succeed in whatever they’re doing. This weekend, it was as simple as helping people learn how to take better photos. At the Corporate Job ™ I loved being a decision maker and mentoring others in their career paths - when someone credits you for helping them get the job of their dreams or into management, that’s pretty darn awesome. Lately, a few of the people I’ve encouraged to go into business for themselves (because they are crazy amazing with fab talent and just need self confidence!) have taken the leap, and have told me they would never have done it if I hadn’t inspired them or encouraged them. Wow. What do I even say to that?

That - right there - is the single thing that gives me the most joy out of anything in the world. I am SO PASSIONATE about living your dreams and finding your passion and just getting out there and trying things. Life is too short for anything else.

I’ve been toying with the idea of doing more formal business consulting and mentoring, although I’m not sure what that would look like. I love small business and I know I have so much I can share and help others with. And, on the side of self, I get so much joy out of watching others succeed - I’ll take that drug any day. I’m just still trying to figure out where it all fits. On the life plan, I know exactly what I want to be doing in 5 years (which is related to what I just said… but I’m not ready to share it all yet) - I just haven’t figured out yet how to get from here to there and what’s in between.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 at 9:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.