Click Pro and Other Fun Photo Features!
I have SO many blogs planned and haven't had any time to do it. Big things have been happening. I just turned 40, I'm going to Hawaii this week, I'm way behind on my editing, and I've been working my tushy off on getting things running with some new business software and booking new sessions from Spring all the way to Christmas! But there are a couple things I wanted to mention here before I go back and blog all the awesome sessions I want to talk about.
First, I can't believe I haven't written here about becoming a Click Pro with www.clickinmoms.com! This has been a big goal of mine, and I really love that site for the amazing educational and support opportunities. I have lost count of how many workshops and breakouts I've done and how many tutorials and blogs I've read since I discovered it in September of 2017. As soon as I realized that you can apply to be a Click Pro, I started working on my portfolio. Click Pros have opportunities to be published in Click Magazine, write for the blog, enter contests, write tutorials for the Clickin Moms forums, and other awesome perks. You have to submit a portfolio of 150 photos which are graded on a rubric that scores each photo 1-6 in the following categories:
Exposure Triangle
Color and White Balance
Use of Light
Composition and Posing
Processing Cohesion and Polish
Technical Basics
Creativity, Expression, and Intention
You have to get at least 4 or 5 in every category to become a Pro (you can only get a 4 in 3 or fewer categories). I redid my portfolio so many times, but in January, I finally just decided to apply just to see how close I was. In February, I was accepted! I maybe cried a little. And since then I've been overwhelmed with all the things I can and should be doing to really take advantage of being in the program. But for now, I've just been posting on the Click Pro Daily Project, a blog where the Click Pros can post something every day. Once a week they choose a Daily of the Week, which is featured on the sidebar of the blog for that week and in the DOTW page forever. The Click Pros are all still kind of celebrities to me, and their work is amazing, so it's intimidating for me to even post on the Daily Project, and I didn't expect to have a photo chosen as the Daily of the Week for years, if ever.
Well, friends, this week, the very day after my 40th bday, one of my photos was chosen as the Daily of the Week!! WOW! It's just very exciting for me. They even change out your original post with a pretty version with a badge. :) Like so:
So there it is! My pretty girlies all dressed up for Easter and freezing in the Spring wind! YAY! I love this photo so much, and I'm so glad it was chosen as the DOTW. It was also chosen as the Canon Photo of the Week and will be featured on the Click Magazine Instagram account this week, and will also be featured on the Hello Storyteller blog. It was also featured on 10 other photography hubs the week I posted it! YAY! I had a lot of photos I really loved from this session (I'll blog several of them later), but this is definitely the gem of the session. I am going to print it very large and put it . . . somewhere. I don't know.
BUT THERE'S MORE! I also had a wonderful feature on an awesome blog by the amazing photographer Tanya Moon of www.tanyamoonphotography.com. She interviewed me for the "Photographers Who Inspire" series she does, and the other photogs she has featured are so amazing and inspiring. I love being part of such a supporting community that likes to feature and uplift and inspire each other rather than compete! She said such nice things, and it's my first interview as a photographer, so it warms my little heart. :) Go give it a read and ignore how may times I say "HA!"
It's so fun to have your work recognized in any small way, and these ways seem very big to me. Considering the years I kind of took off from photography, and my recent obsessive way of working on it like a full-time job, it's nice to be validated and recognized as a "real" photographer. I'm excited to keep improving, keep working with fun clients, keep teaching, and hopefully gaining more opportunities as a Click Pro and maybe even have my own breakout or workshop some day! Oh, that's definitely my dream!