Recharge

"Kate Panos of Whiteford, Md. takes advantage of recent summer-like temperatures by bouncing and performing a trick on a trampoline stationed in the backyard Thursday evening."

Sometimes shooting every day will get you into a negative rhythm. How? By shooting the same types of assignments over and over. It gets redundant.

Other times you’re spot on and everything you shoot is made effortlessly.

And then there is the middle road. The average - your standard performance.

I prefer one of the latter, but life isn't perfect and everyone has bad days.

Earlier this week, I was in a slump. I felt that everything I shot wasn't to my own standards and I needed to find a positive way out.

When I am in a rut, I find shooting things that I enjoy brings me out of these valleys. Simply using my camera creatively during daily, fun activities.

In this case, it was using a little bit of inspiration from fellow Maryland shooter and all around good guy, Charlie Shoemaker of the The Gazette. All it took was a glance at his blog (Thanks, man).

His most recent post had some interesting images of him and a friend bouncing around on a trampoline. With the use of a nice sky and strobe, he created some ‘featurey’ images (is that even a word?) and a headline that is sure to catch anyone's attention, "Saturday, sure, let's jump."

With that in mind, I decided to take advantage of a delightful, sunny and 70 degree Thursday evening. Kate stopped by my parents house to have me help do some art work for her second grade class.

Having the urge to shoot some images, we goofed around on the trampoline that is stationed in the backyard. It gets a lot of use by my nephews, and I am glad it's not a lawn ornament. Random fact: I think I got it for my 13th birthday.

Anyways, I did a little essay of Kate and I flopping around on the trampoline. It was nice to just fluently shoot images exactly how I saw them with no pressures of tight deadlines.

It eases the mind and erases the bad assignments. It's a recharge.

And then it clicks in my head, as it always does when I do this, that I always get images I like when having fun.

Sometimes we get bogged down, as I've mentioned before, and we need to take a break from what we love. But when you passion is your career, that is sometimes difficult.

Conversely, it's import to live, eat and breathe your trade, because the most important thing is to do a huge volume of work. This will only help you get your work to where it as good as your ambitions.

To see the rest of the images click here.

Saturday I'll be in Washington D.C., not shooting anything, which kind of sucks because there are a lot of good games in the area this weekend.

Side note: Check out Fernando's a spin of Darnay's "Forty 5 Days" blog. It's conveniently called "40 Five Days." Pretty entertaining. Although I think I am Fernando's only subscriber.