One of my issues as a photographer is that I shoot photos faster than I can process and share them. I’m addicted to it. But now, many of them are just sitting either on a harddrive on my desk, or in my photo album on my phone. Yes, it has even begun to be a problem with the stuff I have shot with my iPhone. Some of them I haven’t even looked at since the day I took them – years ago. If you’re not a photographer it may difficult to understand – but they all feel like a weight on my shoulders to me now. They shouldn’t be though – because I shot them for myself. I shot them because I love to shoot. None of it is client work. Nobody or nothing is pushing me for them – except for my desire to finish what I started.

I’ve tried telling myself that I will not shoot anymore personal work until I get caught up with processing what I’ve already shot.

Right.

That hasn’t worked out so well for me. So then sometime this past year I told myself that I would start processing just one photo per day. Just one.

Yeah.

That hasn’t worked so well for me either.  Life and lack of disciple on my part had a way of getting in the way of that.

So, I’ve decided to start processing and posting a photo per day here on my blog. I’ve had people tell me that they look forward to my random post on Facebook, most of which are photos I’ve shot. So, maybe by publicly saying I will process and post a photo a day, I actually will. And maybe, just maybe, some of those people will give me crap for it if I don’t. That’s my prayer. The idea is to create a sense of accountability for myself here.

The rules I’ve thought to set for myself so far in order to accomplish this goal:

1.) Spend no more than 30 min per day on each image.

2.) Make my photo of the day challenge the first thing I do when I start my workday.

Why these rules? Well, the first  is all about time. I’ve spent hours working on a single photo before. My desire to do everything just so, and make it perfect, will keep me from doing anything at all. And this is why I have so much work sitting around on my harddrives needing to be processed still. And the second? I’ve learned that if I don’t get things done that are important (prayer, exercise, reading educational and motivational books) first thing  in the morning that they all get put on the back burner and forgotten about until bedtime – when I’m too tired to do any of them at all.

So, the photo at the top of this post is my photo of the day for today – January 5th, 2015. It’s of my longtime friend, Jeremy. He and I had some good times fishing and hunting together while in high school and college. The dude is hilarious. Another friend of mine from high school, Chris Tippet, now  owns a business called Whistling Wings that specializes in guided bird hunts (I will do a whole blog post on him and his business one I have all the images from this series finished). Well, todays shot of Jeremy, as well as the rest of the photos I’m sharing in this post, are all shots I shot while home for Thanksgiving of 2013 for my Southern Living series. It was just me following them around as they were quail hunting.

I still have more to process from that day, but this is what I’ve done so far. Hopefully I’ll have them all finished in the next week with this new photo of the day challenge idea going, and I’ll be caught up up with everything sometime in the coming months of this New Year.

I’m determined to make it even better and more productive than last year was.

You can help by giving me poo if you don’t see me posting a photo EVERY SINGLE DAY until I’m caught up. Please enjoy them and share them with anybody that you think may as well.

Happy New Year Everybody.

From Left To Right: Chris, his wife Sarah, and Jeremy

One of Chris’ many beautiful bird dogs.

It’s fun to see these dogs work. They seem to love nothing more than what you see this one doing right here: bringing a bird back to Chris. This is why some dogs have “retriever” in their name – golden retriever, labrador retriever, etc. They were originally bred for it.

Chris calling his dogs with a whistle. That device in his hand is there for when they don’t listen to the whistle….

The beautiful shotgun Jeremy was hunting with until he switched to one of his Benelli Super Sport semi-auto 12 gauges. Why’d he switch? Because he could. The guy is bad news for all game animals that live near him. Quail, dove, duck, deer — all of them.