Trying to find time to engage in some of my favorite activities has been a bit of a struggle lately.I love to say ‘work gets in the way of life’, but we all know you have to work in order to enjoy some of the joys in life!
Work is not always the problem. You see I enjoy a number of creative activities – writing, photography, paper crafting, knitting and reading. Now, each of these activities can be intense and time consuming so actively engaging in th
ese activities on a regular basis can be difficult.
Let’s take a look at these activities:
Writing has been a love and a neglected passion for a number of years. I say it has been neglected because I have not quite figured out a good writing routine. I started this blog as a means to find my way back to writing, but as you can see from
glancing at the previous posts lists I have only been able to keep this up in spurts. The problem maintaining this blog consistently is that I don’t have a true focus
.
You see truly successful blogs tend to focus on one, possibly two subjects and there are scheduled postings with a minimum of one posting per week. I have really got to get busy on making scheduling regular posts.
Additionally, I think I need to redesign my blog so that I can have sections for my various passions. This is a future endeavor, one I hope will take place in the near rather than far off future.
Photography has been a regular activity since I was about 13 and probably earlier than that, but that is when I received my first 35mm SLR camera. Over the years I
have taken photography classes and dabbled with developing
my own photos, but my diligence waned. This Christmas I received a Digital SLR and the photo-bug was reignited! Below is an example of some photos taken while playing around with my
new camera.
These photos bring us to another of my passions – knitting! I recently completed both of the hats pictured above! The bottom over processed photo was taken as part of my work for my Mastering Manual Mode class at Big Picture Online Classes.
The purpose of this class is to help owners of digital DSLR’s take the camera off of automatic and add art to your photography. I can say it’s been a bit of a challenge, but a lot of fun. I’m revisiting some of the basics of photography that I left behind when I picked up my first digital camera.
This is another example from class – the focus of this sample is a
perture settings.
Paper crafting really entails making greeting cards and invitations by hand. Utilizing stamps and a variety of techniques I have come to enjoy creating cards, but I have not found much time to create lately.
Finally, I love reading and every six weeks or so I read a new title thanks to my book club The Literary Sistas! My Sistas and I read only African American fiction, and it is usually of the literary variety. Some of the authors we have read include Toni Morrison, Tananarive Due, Carleen Brice, Virginia DeBerry and Donna Grant, Mat Johnson, and Leonard Pitts to name a few.
I read all authors and some non-fiction because I truly love a good book. The race or nationality of the author is not the first thing I look at, but I do have a tendency to read works by authors of color because they are so often overlooked by the masses.
To further my writing efforts I also post book reviews. Check back in the next couple of weeks for new reviews.
Today was a productive day because I dabbled in photography and found the time to write this post. Progress is made one step at a time! I hope you will join me on this journey.
Comments are always welcome…let me know what you think this might inspire a new post!
Shelley Shockley's Views from Collinwood 