doing

To start this off with a photo, here is 10/52, titled ‘connection’:

Last week I read Jenna’s Post “You do too much” and it really resonated with me.
I get this a lot too, people telling me I do so much or I do too much. It’s true, I have a full-time job plus a growing business, I sew my own clothes, I do yoga, I go horseriding, I have friends, a household etc.
And I am sometimes plain exhausted by it. And I don’t get up at 6am on a Saturday after a long week at the office and jump for joy because I get to work another couple of hours on my own business doing tax stuff.
But still, I’m with Jenna. Not doing it all is simply not an option. Even if inspiration looks like “this” a lot of the time, it is what keeps me happy and inspired and proud and pushes me out of my comfort zone and makes me grow in ways I could never anticipate. All the hard stuff is so worth the rush of adrenaline and happiness that creating something good out of thin air gives me, whether it be a garment or a photo or a whole business.
This is so much less eloquent than Jenna put it, but it needed out today on a cold, grey, snowy morning on which the excitement of inspiration and creation (and the anticipation of a spring hopefully just around the corner) is pretty much the only thing which could make me crawl out of bed.

And speaking of inspiration, I updated and sorted my Pinterest boards a while ago and made some new ones too and always forgot to mention it here. So, all new and tidy over there in case you want to have a peek (I do love Pinterest so!).

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my other (new) blog

Just a quick note today to say that my new photography blog is online! I will be sharing current photoshoots and some earlier work there in the coming weeks, so keep an eye one it. I will be blogging in both english and german. After three years of blogging in english I find expressing myself in german in writing quite difficult 🙂
Head over to www.fotografiekoehler.wordpress.com right now to see my latest photoshoot with a friend.

Don’t worry, I will be keeping the tidytipsy blog just the same (minus a few photoshoots). This blog means a lot to me and I consider it to be very personal, private even…funny thing to say about a blog visible to everyone, I know. Still, I write things here that I don’t even really talk about in daily life! My photography blog will be less personal and wordy, but I hope you’ll like it too 🙂

(back) in business

I’ve hinted at this so many times and now I am finally ready to tell: I just founded my own photography business.
I offer portrait, family and animal sessions for now and you can find me on Facebook. In the coming months I will be launching a blog to share photoshoots, a website and a small online shop selling my most requested images as prints.

I am very excited! Juggling a full time office job, a photography business and my personal life will be challenging (in fact, it already is), so I am taking things slowly. In the past months I have done a lot of research, talked to my accountant and learned about taxes and the whole business side of it. I am doing everything in this myself (including the website), so the new pages will be up one at a time.

The idea is to build this business slowly but steadily over the next few years.

I’m happy to be finally doing this and excited to see what 2012 will bring!

things are looking up

…oh, finally! (click here for the song, maybe it doesn’t fit perfectly, but it’s in my head a lot these days).
For various reasons I have been leaving a very substantial part of my everyday life out of this blog: my job. For one, this is a blog about photography and whatever else I feel like doing on the creative side of things and also, you just never know who might be reading this.

Some of you might remember this post a couple of months back, right after I finished my thesis. The 3-month internship I mentioned did in fact turn into a real job pretty quickly, but that was about the only thing right about that job. That, and my two lovely colleagues (hi girls!), who pretty much helped me through every day.
When you get your first real job after college you are excited, hopeful, motivated, eager and a bit anxious to get it right. You don’t set yourself up for failure. When things get off to a tough start, you think “I’ll just need to put in even more effort”, “It’ll start being fun once I get my first paycheck”, “It takes time to adapt to this different environment”, “It’ll start to feel right in no time”.

When it doesn’t, doubts start bubbling to the surface. “Is it me or is it really them?”, “Am I not doing this good enough or is it really just impossible to do it right?”.
I wanted this to work so badly. As arrogant as that sounds, but I am not used to failure. All my life, I’ve stayed true to the motto “where there’s a will there’s a way”. But no will would make me like to go to work to be yelled at every day, to be pressured to treat both clients and employees in a way I don’t feel comfortable with and to feel out of my depth with the things demanded of me.

I guess sometimes it takes an experience like that to realize who you are professionally and act accordingly. When it happens on your first real job, tough luck. I’ll admit the last few months were pretty hard on me and it was starting to affect me physically as well. After a lot of thinking and talking with about everyone who would listen and countless rejections for job applications, I decided to quit and put my energy into looking for a new job, even if it meant an unknown number of months unemployment.

But then my luck turned and the one serious job interview I had turned into an offer to start on 1 December! It will be a completely different environment, a completely different line of business and a new start in a very exciting workplace.
Thanks to everyone who read this to the end! Wish me better luck this time!

shop update

I finally managed to finish the much needed update of my Etsy shop. After a big clean-up it is looking much neater in there now.
There are three new sets of pictures, mostly from my trip to Amsterdam:



and this black and white Amsterdam print is also available:

I plan on taking better care of my shop and listing and renewing much more often, so we’ll see how that goes 🙂

diptychs

You may not have noticed, but I love, love, love dipytchs (2 photos in 1). I am trying to refrain from making too many of them and instead try to take pictures that stand out on their own. But every now and then I can’t help myself and once I start there’s no stopping me.
This pink watering can resides at the barn and was my shot of the day four days ago. It’s an ok shot on its own I think, but I love it along with the lead ropes.

Yesterday was another long business day full of hauling shoe cases and waiting around for clients. It was grey and rainy and foggy outside the whole day, but these little flower vases inside the building totally made up for that! And the upside of sitting around waiting is that you can get lots of handsewing done in between…perfect for little take-along projects (oh, I’m so excited to show my latest, but it’s not quite ready yet).

And here it is only 8am and I already have my shot of the day, my lazy cat Finn doing his daily birdwatch by the window.

Now off to do some much-needed work on my thesis. Have a lovely day!

orange studies or: project 365

Inspired by Julie and Jaqui I too am now doing Project 365. When I first read about it I thought it was a good idea but wasn’t sure if I wanted to try it. I didn’t want to feel pressured to take a photo every single day. I am feeling bad enough about not getting enough work done on my thesis day by day, I didn’t want to add the guilt of not having taken a picture.
I chewed on the idea for quite some time though and it grew on me. I looked through my photo folders and realized I was taking pictures nearly every day anyway! So surely the pressure wouldn’t be too bad, right?
I’ve been doing it a couple of days now and it has been so much more amazing than I imagined! Such an eye-opener, in every sense of the word. Instead of feeling pressured at the end of the day to just take a photo I find I am walking through the world with an open eye for beauty more than ever. I feel I finally SEE.
I had a long day yesterday, travelling 3 hours by car to a business meeting, sitting around there waiting for clients for 6 hours and heading back home. Still, yesterday’s harvest was bright and colourful and lovely and I can’t decide on a favourite at all:



If you’re thinking about doing Project 365 too, go ahead and jump in! You won’t regret it!
By the way, I am planning a major shop update over the next two weeks. I will be adding a bunch of lovely prints and maybe some sewing, so stay tuned 🙂

Back to the 1970s

While my dad’s in hospital I do some business appointments for him, along with the italian boss of the company we’re selling shoes for. I picked him up at the airport yesterday morning and after paying a little hospital visit we set out to drive to the client. Thankfully he has no problem driving my dad’s big Audi…if I had to do that in german traffic I’d die…or cry. German people are mean when they’re driving and they have no patience for someone trying to figure out a vehicle three times as big as the one they’re used to and so crammed with shoe cases that you can’t see a thing behind you. And automatic…I’ve never even driven automatic before.
We got to the client’s office and it was a big villa. Once we stepped inside we were literally taken back to the 70’s. Dark wood paneled walls, brown plush armchairs, brown stained glass coffee tables and on the walls pictures from the client’s shops as they were in the late 70s/early 80s. It was all in good condition but I could totally picture my dad starting out business as a young guy in these very rooms 30 years earlier. It was quite fascinating.

Heck, even the coffee cups and milk trays were totally still stuck in the 70s!

It’s actually a bunch of really important clients who do this appointment together and there were about 10 of them. I’d previously thought they would just cram around the shoes on the shelves and poke them and discuss them.
But no, they filed into the room quietly, made a big circle around the first group of shelves, looked at me expectantly and said “You may start”. Gulp. I’ve presented a collection before, but usually that is a one-on-one interaction with one client. Also this collection is brand new and I am not really familiar with it yet. Still, I dove in and made an impromptu presentation of the whole collection and I think it went pretty well. Phew.
To leave you with another picture, this was our way back at dusk in awful weather and bad traffic…so glad I wasn’t driving 🙂