Year of Personal Growth

“Plans are only wrecking balls, then life gets on its way” - one of my favorite music lyrics, penned by The Beautiful Girls’ lead man, Matt McHugh. While the romantic in me still loves that line, progress often takes planning. I made a goal this year to use some tools to help me organize myself photographically, learn a few new techniques to improve efficiency and to better manage my time; do grown up business things.

Along with the theory, I wanted to have a couple of tangible goals for the year, one being of photographic nature, the other, a personal project. Do a full year, 12-image photo series, and, build a greenhouse to help extend the growing season in our strange Okanagan climate.

I am generally a great self starter, but I am often apathetic to completion. I have a fair amount of 80% complete projects around, as my interests tend to jump depending on my mood. My ultimate goal was to stick to the photo project while getting the greenhouse built in time for fall, before the mercury drops. The way to get to the goal line was through better habits.

The photography project I chose was to study famous artists and works of art and either emulate style, replicate images or take inspiration from the artist. With proper planning, better editing technique and a lot of patience, my daughter and I worked through 11 famous images/artists. Nearly every shot was done using thrifted outfits, each original image studied for light, and then, as I’ve never done before, penciled in dates on a physical calendar to keep myself accountable.

I come from a long line of gardeners, none professional, but all who have much more experience that I do. I have very strong memories of spending time in my grandma’s musty, Vancouver Island greenhouse, in particular the smell that only comes from wet, salty ocean air, mixed with begonias, petunias and mosses. My other grandma’s garden was hard packed Okanagan clay, mixed with a ton of rock… something I had the pleasure of tilling over many a summer. But from that hard soil came an enormous abundance of plant life, year after year.

My turn. Build a garden space, leave room for a greenhouse and do it as sustainably as possible. My only building experience came in my summers from about grade 8-11, working construction jobs to earn some extra spending money, so planning was extremely important for me. Scour Marketplace for windows, doors, roofing and other materials, watch many many hours of Youtube and measure three times / cut once

I finished the greenhouse in October, an unseasonably warm month for us here in Kelowna, which meant the flowers were still in full bloom in greenhouse. I was also well on pace to get my 12 images for our photography project, largely due to my newfound ability to organize my time and keep on top of things.

This presented a great opportunity for us. Use the new skills gained from a year of creative shoots, the knowledge of viewing countless images and go back to my notes to shoot something created all on our own. This is the 12th image in our set and one that caps off the year for us.

With the help of modern tools like Rocketbooks and good old standbys like a calendar, I managed to pull both projects off this year, and even had time for one more big project; maybe something to reveal next year. I could not have done this without improving my habits and technique.

The rest of that song lyric goes “there’s more to this than I recall, probably more than I can say”. I’m guessing it was something about there being a time and place for plans.