Looking Back on 2021
How it started....
This year was a crazy one for me, for a lot of reasons. It was year two of the lovely thing that is the COVID pandemic, which killed more opportunities for me than I care to admit, and we welcomed another beautiful little girl into this crazy world of ours which was a whole slew of challenges we never saw coming. I took the month of December off from updates because of how busy we were with the holidays, but I was also pretty burned out from how insanely busy my fall months were.
I took a few months off with our new little one being born in February. We're fortunate that my wife's employer gives a 16 week maternity leave, so we were able to spend a ton of time together with our girls and watch them fall in love with each other as we watched our new baby grow and learn. All the naps and bottle feedings for me allowed the opportunities to think and plan out ideas I had in the back of my mind and to read up on new techniques I wanted to learn. We also took an obscene amount of photos and videos of our kiddos since they're going to need to get used to it sooner or later!
I started a new partnership with a company based out of Bismarck, ND named Glasser Images. I was incredibly excited to work with them because I desperately wanted to get into wedding photography and they offered all the tools to do it. I started off covering a ton of engagement sessions for people that had booked with them and learning their platform. I met some incredible couples with some amazing love stories ranging from the modern day "we met on an app" to high school sweethearts and everything in-between. Now if you heard about Glasser in recent months, you're already aware of what happened with their company, but rest assured I was not impacted by any of that fallout (thankfully). This did, however, kill my foot in the door to covering weddings which was a huge bummer for me.
The summer was a little more slow for me than it had been the year prior, but I was still shooting a good amount of sessions. I got a handful of referrals from past clients and also started to see a big upswing in clients visiting my website and reaching out based on images they saw or other blog posts they enjoyed reading. Believe me when I say that hearing those things is a HUGE breath of fresh air for me because it can feel like I'm just talking to myself sometimes and leaves me wondering if anyone really cares what I'm putting out there.
More on the next post to close out the second half of my year, so check it out here!
Currently Listening To: Clumsy by All Time Low