Come back

Its nearing the end of my fall semester back at McGill and I must admit that its been a sort of two lane road. On the one hand, I've finally switched out of Math and taken development studies - which has really made me a thinker and begged me to ask the question: Why didn't I make this decision all those years ago?
Financial crisis has hit me, and to be very honest it occupies my mind to a large extent. It stresses me out a great deal as I wonder of how to proceed with life in general: But then again this is an opportunity to learn a great deal: Learn to be self-sufficient, learn to take matters into one's own hands, find solutions to problems out of desperation. It is an opening for ideas to conquer and I keep telling myself this as I actively search for jobs and continually start to think of the future: where I will be and what I will do.

Photography comes in as a solution in some regards. I've made enough from photography this semester to justify buying back the 17-50 Tamron that i sold earlier in the summer. I've made some $500 for about 10 hours of work. Not bad for someone that really enjoys the job. But I've decided that I need to increase the number of gigs I get, find out ways to advertize, think of ways to improve and learn all the different elements of photography. While I do consider studio to be an effective cash-cow for photographers, I don't believe I have the skills as yet to really meddle with this.

So here I am, terribly under-equipped for the jobs that I'm doing, but still manage to bring out a great deal of satisfaction with my customers for them to keep hiring me and thanking me for the amazing photos.

I go back to the start of the semester when I was actively considering selling my digital gear and getting a normal job. Thankfully, having a higher end Sony camera was restrictive enough that the market didn't respond when I wanted it to and when I finally and rarely got offers, I wasn't prepared to sell the camera.

So here I am, at a position of equilibrium (So turns out I'm the economist that can't spell out equilibrium), decided on the path that I must take:

1) Launch a new website
2) Promote the website
3) Design business cards and network like crazy

This should earn me some $400 each month that I should really invest in more decent gear, namely lighting really... As much as I like to use ambient light, there are times that I couldn't help but wish that the lighting was better. And so much for Sigma flashes, I will make sure that purchases in the future are more Sony/Minolta based.

Anyways, enough about the boring plan. I will post the website when it comes out. Thanks so much for reading if you actually made it to the bottom. I haven't talked about my summer back to Kenya, as well as all the things that led up to this event. The photography is actually quite integral to the story... But I'll save that for later. Thanks for reading.

Cheers,
Arvind