2019 was a kind of amazing year for my photography. For the straight numbers, over the 12 months I did 90+ shoots, produced 12500+ edited photos, broke 1K followers on instagram (in like, the past couple of days...) I did production stills for multiple plays and proved that I can manage a 24 hour turnaround. I tried ordering my first prints (one given as a raffle prize, the other as a gift to a friend). I seriously upped my game when it came to modelling shoots and shot of ton of latex, which has long been a weird passion of mine (yes, my brain is wired a little odd). I shot with friends, I shot with people I'd never met before that day, and overall I had a ridiculous amount of fun spending time creating art with amazing people. In the new year I already have potential new things like background shots for a TV special, traveling out of province for a wedding shoot, and the various requests for more latex modelling shoots have started to roll in (and yes, I'm always up for more of those.) But also this past year, I kind of lost all semblance of having my own life. I'm a code monkey by day and the photography is something I do in my spare time for fun. But during the last 6 months of the year I literally never had a point where I didn't owe people photos, or had a shoot scheduled within a couple of days. I pretty much gave up on going to conventions. The only time I had to myself seemed to be when I came down with a cold and didn't have the energy to edit anything… which just meant I got stressed that people were waiting for me. Even now, with everything cleared off, I'm having trouble getting my brain to shut down. It used to be I could play video games for hours, and all of sudden I can't play for more than an hour without getting restless. It feels like I've forgotten how to relax. So going forward, I very much want to keep doing this. I want to keep creating and getting better at shooting/lighting/editing... but I also need to figure out how to balance that with my necessities of life (like keeping my apartment from its continued fall into a state of disrepair) and giving myself some sort of downtime. https://www.instagram.com/p/B6zIVwLgxRs/?igshid=r6or0ge9i3wy