I’m thankful for time. It’s something I’ve come to realize is exceedingly fleeting and incredibly valuable. Time with Avery and Alix. Time with family and friends. Time to just “be.” 

I’m thankful for the past few [semi] unplugged days with my family and friends as we celebrated and spent time together over Thanksgiving. I’ll be the first to admit that I can get into workaholic-mode as I’m a bit of a perfectionist at times, but nothing recharges my batteries and keeps me grounded like being with loved ones. I’ll be catching up on my “Thirty Days of Thanks” posts from the past few days soon.

I’m thankful for life and the many blessings I’m not worthy of yet have anyway. I’m looking forward to unplugging and spending time with family and friends this Thanksgiving. I hope you have a very happy Thanksgiving as well. 

Of all the blessings in my life, the one I take for granted the most is my other job as a part time cover driver at UPS.

While running my business is both incredibly challenging and rewarding, so is providing for my family and enabling my wife to pursue her dreams.

There are so many things that make being wholly self-employed as a photographer amazing but there are definitely some less glamorous things about it as well (most notably unstable income and expensive health insurance).

UPS is just part time work and sometimes it feels like a waste of time (and if I’m being perfectly honest sometimes I’m even embarrassed by it because it feels like a waste of my creativity) but the fact of the matter is that I know it’s serving a much higher purpose.

It’s not only allowed me to take more risks and be more specific in my business, it’s also facilitating Alix’s dream by making it possible for her to go to school and providing us with stability and health care in the process.

I absolutely hate helping some mega-billion dollar corporation get richer, but my business and our family wouldn’t be where we are today without the flexibility and security provided to us by this job. So while it may not feel like it all the time, I am most definitely thankful for this job and what it affords our little family.

I’m thankful for finding film. Since I began taking photography seriously as a hobby and then as freelance work before starting my business I have always been drawn to film photography even though I was always a digital shooter. There was something magical about the process and tangible about the results that made it feel better to me. It was a more thoughtful and deliberate approach to capturing an image compared to shooting away haphazardly until the memory card was full. 

Three years ago I started seriously researching film capture, two years ago I started shooting film for personal work and in very specific and limited situations for clients, and for the past year it has been the cornerstone of my approach and style of photography. It’s changed the way I work and changed the way I look at the world. 

I’m thankful for Alix’s family. They’re seriously the best and the sort of family I always wanted growing up. I couldn’t ask for better people to be in my life.

I know sometimes I might seem a little nostalgic and anti-technology, but I am definitely thankful for the modern conveniences we get to enjoy on a day to day basis. I’m watching Breaking Bad via my computer while I keep an eye on Avery napping via her baby monitor all while checking email and Facebook via my iPhone. It’s an incredible world we live in and it’s crazy to think none of this stuff was around when I was a kid. I can’t imagine where we’ll be in 20 or 30 more years.