quick update

I'll have a bigger one on Friday... with a new site layout, if all goes well! I have gotten about 4 hours of sleep a night for three nights now, but I'm finally done all my papers and major projects. Last Friday I shot a wedding in Victoria, and so I'll begin to edit that on Friday, and will have some pictures to show with my new website. Beyond that, I've been thinking in a bit of a school-induced fog the last few days, so I don't have much to say. Stay tuned for Friday though, it'll be good.

Update

Yes, I know that I missed Wednesday's post, and that now my order is all screwed up. Oh well. Not much to report, actually - life has kept me very busy this week. I did do a shoot at our Storyteller's concert, and also at a scholarship evening. the scholarship evening wasn't that exciting, and that Storytellers shots are still in queue to be edited. The pictures that WERE edited pertain to The Tremulance album art that I'm shooting. I did the inside liners yesterday, a 9-photo collage of a table covered in Poloroids. I love Photoshop - it took 9 shots taken on a 50mm, and blended them into a nearly-seamless panorama. I would post the shot, but it needs to be blown up fairly big to be appreciated... so you'll have to wait for the album to emerge. I'm also seriously considering switching blogs to SquareSpace - it is pretty freaking sweet, and looks amazing. A little more expensive than what I'm doing now, but it might be worth it.

Twitter, Weddings, and time

Or how I never seem to have enough of it. This week has been rather exciting work-wise. I've lined up one more wedding for sure, for May, and another strongly possible one for mid-August. That makes three on the go, which is incredibly exciting. I still need to overhaul the site here with new galleries, but that can wait for a while I think. My first print ad also appeared in this months issue of Faith Today Magazine, which is quite a joy for me. I have also signed up to the microblogging site, Twitter, which is all the rage with the hip cats these days. I am actually quite enjoying it - I'm fairly ADD, so being able to send quick bursts of thought from anywhere to the web is actually quite handy for me. I've created a live feed to this site which you can find on the sidebar. Feel free to follow me, if you are so inclined. I'm also trying to find a time to meet with Jamison to do the last shots for his album, and that should happen any day now, hopefully. More to come on that soon. One of these days I will actually formulate a blog post ahead of time and plan out what I'm going to say, rather than having a shotgun approach to whatever happens to be floating around in my head. Not today though; today I need to sleep. I'll leave you with one of my favorite shots from Disneyland - Yes, this was shot from the top of the big drop on Splash Mountain. Enjoy. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="470" caption="Look out below...."][/caption]

How to win friends and influence people

So, apparently the cool kids keep their blogs updated more regularly than once a month. Who knew? So here is how this will work from now on. This blog will be kept updated with my semi-professional life. Photography, work at the Jubilee Rooms on East Hastings (where I'll be moving to it a month), and thoughts on my journey over the next year will be kept here. My other blog will be kept updated with my thoughts on faith, my education, and my more personal or 'non-professional' life. You are more than welcome to read both. For even more ease of use, the personal blog automatically feeds into Facebook. I might make this one do the same, now that I think about it. I'll be updating on a rotating system, updating each site every other day. That means this site will be next updated on Monday, while my personal blog will be updated This coming Saturday. Enough housekeeping. This weekend has brought about some pleasant surprises on the job front. As I have mentioned before, I'm moving to Vancouver on May 1 to work the Community Builders Group. This weekend details were confirmed, and so I am finally getting the sense that it is really happening - and I'm excited. This is an opportunity to live with those who have next to nothing - something some are calling 'incarnational living'. To live among those that are considered worthless among society, and to be able to affirm their worth, is a privilege that sounds almost too good to be true. I will be taking my camera with me, and I plan on continuing with photography as well. If you have an interest in hiring my services, send me an email at info@jordanshawphotography.com.

A change in direction?

I'm unsure of how to proceed with this blog. My original plan was to keep in focused purely on photography-related business. But as most of my friends know, I don't fit things into boxes very well, and different parts of my life tend to spill together into a slightly jumbled mess. Regardless, I want to start blogging more seriously about other areas of my life after being inspired by the Great Blog-Off, which is currently running between Jeff Hawker, Tony Bookless, Alan Schram, and Adam Loewen. The question is whether I should expand my blog here, an integral part of my website, or whether I should keep my non-photography-related thoughts elsewhere. I like the idea of having an integrated web personality, rather than a segregated one. At this point in my career, I'm not terribly worried if I lose some business because people find out that I am an overly-anxious random-trivia-loving moderately liberal Christian. These are all parts of my character, parts of what make me, well, me. Another possibility is to modify this blog so that jordanshawphotography.com points to the 'business' related posts, and then have links to the integrated 'all posts' or a separate stream of 'personal' or 'theology' related posts. The only real problem with this plan is that I have no idea how to do it, or even if it can be done using WordPress architecture. In the future, I will blog more. Why? Well, according to the great Adam Loewen (I'm not linking that, you already got one link Adam, don't be greedy), Blogging is the answer to everything. But more seriously I want to start blogging more because I am soon moving to East Hastings to live for eight months among the homeless and nearly-homeless there. I want to record that journey, and no journey starts the second one steps on to the road. Every journey has a million little stages before the physical journey begins, and so too is the case here. This month leading up to my move feels like a vitally important prologue. And now for a picture! This is one of my favorites from a recent trip to Disneyland with my family. Good times.