March 2020

The beginning of March seems like such a distant memory at this moment. At that time, there was a slight fear of coronavirus at that time, but most people could not foresee how things would drastically change in a couple weeks. I remember at the beginning of the month going to a couple events that had a decent sized crowds, like the Lobby Day in Springfield and CharletheFirst show in Milwaukee, and not being too worried at that time. Then the next week, I remember things beginning to change vey quickly with events being cancelled and places beginning to close leading me to realize how serious we should be taking coronavirus. That is when worry started to creep into my world and I began to question whether I would have been better off skipping those events.

The seriousness of the current situation really began to sink in during the evening of March 11th. On that evening it was announced that the NBA season was being suspended, Tom Hanks and his wife had tested positive for coronavirus, and that there would be a ban on travel from Europe. As I went to bed that evening, I remember being stressed and hoping that when I woke up the next day that I would find out this was all a bad dream. Of course when I did wake up the next day, I found out that the world was not returning to normal and I was wondering what to expect next. At that time I had a couple photo jobs scheduled in the next couple days and I was unsure if those would still be occurring.

Those couple photos gigs did end up going along as planned and were the last bit of photography I did before social distancing and shelter-in-place went into effect. My daily has not been changed all that much during this pandemic versus prior to it. Most weekdays no matter what’s going on in the world, I spend most my working hours over in my office/studio space at my parents’ place. The main difference is having more people over at my parents’ home. My sister, Josie, came back early from studying abroad in Prague since her program was closed down early because of the pandemic. Meanwhile, my mum, who is an elementary school teacher, has been home as well since all the local schools were closed down around the middle of March.

So I’m sure you are curious to know how things have been for my business during the month of March and what I’ve been up to. Well, this month actually started off strong with a few photography gigs. Before things began to shut down, I had an engagement session, did headshots for most of the staff at Heart of the City, and a senior portrait session. Then during the second half of the month, I’ve had time to work on a couple things. The main task that has taken up a decent amount of my time was putting in work on reselling items on eBay. A lot of the items that I’ve listed most recently were from an early March rummage sale in Gurnee with a variety of other items that I found at both my home and my parents’ home. This time has also allowed me to finally update listing of prints I was selling on the Facebook page for my business. Part of the thought process was that I was hoping to contribute to the virtual ArtWauk. However, when I went to participate I didn’t see much of anyone posting their work. Well, that’s it for now, I hope everyone out there is staying safe during these trying times.

February 2020

Usually writing my monthly blog post late into the month doesn’t seem all that strange. However, with everything that has occurred with the coronavirus pandemic, it feels a little strange this time around. February really does feel like a time when life much simpler and everything seemed to be moving in the right direction overall. If you were to take the month at the surface, it didn’t look over impressive, but I was certainly feeling hopeful about what would be coming the rest of the year.

This month didn’t bring with it much in the way of photography gigs, but it certainly felt like things were moving in the right direction. I once again participated in the bridal tasting and preferred event at Illinois Beach Resort in Zion, IL. Compared to when they held their event in January, the event in February was better attended and there was just a much better energy in the room overall. It was nice getting to participate in an event like that early in the month. The rest of the month I got a few different inquiries from brides about being their wedding photographer. It was beginning to look like I would be having a busy summer with a calendar full of weddings.

The month of February also saw me begin to get into the business of reselling to make some money on the side. I started off my business with a combination of unwanted items from both my apartment and my parents’ home. I have a strange assortment of items from clothing all the way to figurines left behind by my Nana available for purchase. I was really excited when I thought I had sold my first item pretty quickly after listing them. However, I would soon find out that the only reason this person was interested was because they knew I was new to selling and were trying to run a scam on me.

I also had a decent social life during the month of February with some interesting variety to it. To start the month I went to CLC for a Friday evening showing of the Chinese film, “A Long Day’s Journey into Night”. The next weekend, my mum and I did our usual and checked out the February edition of ArtWauk. Then following weekend was one with a couple performance with a Friday night trip down to Three Brothers Theater for a visiting comedy group called Deep Space Comedy. The next night I went over to Waukegan High School to catch their performance of “Midsummer’s Night Dream. So I’d say looking back at February now and especially in comparison, it was a pretty darn good month really.

January 2020

2020 has gotten off to a bit of an uneven start, but I’m happy to say that I feel like I’m making progress. My energies have mostly been related to my photography. The first Saturday of the month I spent my afternoon at Illinois Beach Resort for their bridal tasting and vendor event since I am a preferred vendor over there. Then the following Thursday, I had my first photography gig of the new year. I did photography for an event to celebrate the fact that Feroze Hanif was donating the money that he won as one H&R Block’s Franchisee of the Year to the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum. The Thursday after that I was yet again doing event photography with this time it being for the Lake County Community Foundation’s Engage Lake County that took place out at the University Center in Grayslake. The final victory I had in my business during the month of January was getting booked for three more weddings this coming year.

I like many people have tried to make changes to go with changing of the calendar to a new year. One of my goals for the new year has been keeping up with my routine of running semi regularly. At the end of 2019, I was doing pretty good on keeping up with my running. Unfortunately in the first month of the new year it has been really hit and miss for me. Part of my problem is that I’m resisting getting a gym membership even during the cold winter months and as a result have to coordinate my run with the Field House’s times where Waukegan residents can use the indoor track for free. The first available time for city residents to run is at 9am ends up cutting into the work day. Meanwhile for the later time starting at 7:30pm, I struggle to motivate to change into my running clothes and hit the track after the work day.

There are also a couple new ventures of mine that have started in 2020. For one, I’ve been spending about an hour each day doing a little housework at my parents’ house. This is meant to help supplement my income during these slow winter months. The second new endeavor for me is I’ve entered into the area of stock photography. Starting in the middle of January I started to upload some of my past photos to Adobe Stock. Here I am more than a month later and I still haven’t quite caught up with my back catalog of photos. You can bet that once I am caught up, I’m going to start getting back out there to take some new photos.

Overall, I’d say it has been a decent beginning to the new year. My social life has been fairly quiet the last month, but I won’t complain too much about that. A lot of time my weekend nights have been spent being a homebody cuddled up on the couch with my cats enjoying a few drinks and finally watching Orange is the New Black on Netflix. Otherwise those evenings were spent hanging a bit with my parents and even occasionally my sister, Josie, before she headed to the Czech Republic for her semester abroad.

December 2019

Here we are in the back half of the month of January and I’m just now writing a blog post about the month of December. I figure that even though this might not quite be the ideal time for my post about last month, I’ll do it anyway since I’m finally mostly caught up on work. I would say that the month of December ended up being a decent blend in regards to my business and personal life.

On the business side of things I started the month off with a few familiar faces as I had an outdoor session with the Deininger family. Also early in December, I worked for the Association of Music Partners at Waukegan High School in order to provide posed photos for the high school students at their concerts. Then later in the month, I had another photo shoot with my nephew, Gabriel. My final bit of work for the month of January was an engagement session with my buddy, Raul, and his fiancé, Frances. I’ll most likely be posting about that session tomorrow so be on the look out for that.

Meanwhile on the personal side of things, the month of December provided a good mixture of friends and family. Yet again I got together for breakfast with my buddy from middle school, Tomasz. Also, I had a lot of fun going to a party for my friend’s birthday. My friend, Dee, rented out a very cool loft space and then had some of her D.J. friends perform. It was a ton of fun between the music and getting to hang out with friends that I hadn’t hung out with in awhile. My final bit of social closed out the year as I went to the Chop Shop on New Year’s Eve to see Russ Liquid, Marvel Years, and Artifakts. I went alone because it was a solid lineup and then ended up being surprised when I ran into some friends of mine at the show.

Of course the month of December isn’t quite complete without spending some time with family. This is especially the case in my family since in addition to the holidays, we have quite a few birthdays. My dad, mum and myself all have birthdays near the end of the month of December. For Christmas, most of our family comes together on Christmas Eve. In recent years, my mum has invited most of siblings along with their children to come over in the afternoon on Christmas Eve to decorate gingerbread cookies. Then in the evening we have chili for dinner and then do our family gift exchange. Then on the actual Christmas day, Christmas is pretty calm at my parents’ place with it being just my parents, my 2 siblings that were in town, and myself. The last few years, we’ve even shifted from an elaborate, traditional Christmas meal to lasagna instead.

October 2019

The work to life balance continues to be a little out of whack since I’m more focused on my business at the moment. For work I had interesting assortment of jobs in the month of October and took me to some new and interesting places for the first time. The first few weeks of the month, I had a gig of one kind or another. My first photo gig of the month was local as I did an engagement session for a former classmate of mine and her fiancé at Van Patten Woods. The first new location that I visited this month was Holy Hill in Hubertus, WI. Since the family session was later in the day, I decided to head up on the early side and do a little bit of wandering of my own. Then the following week, I ran a photo booth for my niece’s birthday party.

The end of the month turned out to be a little hectic as I had 3 different gigs over the weekend and the 1 final gig to close out the month. The final Saturday of October started out with me doing my first gender reveal session. Then in the afternoon on Saturday, I did some before photos of a house that a friend of mine recently bought and will be having remodeled. For Sunday, I made my first trip to Morton Arboretum for an awesome engagement session. To closeout the month of October, I had a friend of mine stop by for a headshot session.

Now as I previously stated, my social life was fairly calm this past month. After the family portrait session at Holy Hill, I came back home spent some time hanging with my buddy and former coworker, Carl, at his place. The following weekend, Carl and I managed to finally find a time when another former coworker, Chris Mallon, could join us. We ended up going out to Salutos for pizza and some well overdue catching up. Although, I did run a little late that evening because I decided to stop by ZombieWauk beforehand. Then on Halloween night, I decided to dress as Shaggy from Scooby-Doo and go on the Waukegan Main Street’s Boos and Brews Bar Crawl. I ended up catching up with the people on that bar crawl at Win Win and followed it up from there with 17 North and Green Town Tavern later.

The month of November is likely to be more of the same with mostly business with a little bit of fun mixed in. So far I have shoots tentatively planned for the next two weekends with a family session next weekend and an engagement session the following weekend. I’m also working to on getting together a Christmas mini session perhaps for Small Business Saturday if all goes well. My studio presents a unique challenge for me, but I’m going to work hard to figure out how to best utilize it. Currently, I don’t have much in the way of social planned, but I am looking forward to spending Thanksgiving with my family. Well, that’s all for now until next time.

September 2019

I have a mixture of emotions about the past month. On one hand the positive is that I had a decent amount of work and had a decent amount of social events during this month. In fact, the second weekend of September definitely goes down as one of the more hectic ones that I’ve had during my time as a photographer. On Friday the 13th, I photographed the wedding of Billy and Ryan at Brighton Acres in Oshkosh, WI. The next day on Saturday, I did photography for Faith in Place’s Green Team Summit and VIP Reception at the Field Museum in Chicago. Once that was over I hurried back to Waukegan so I could do an hour of photography at birthday party as well.

It was a bit of a blessing that after that weekend, I had a couple weeks free to get caught up on editing photos from that weekend. Me and my folks decided to celebrate getting caught up on editing by going out to Quonset for some pizza and beer. It was also nice be able to get caught up on my editing in time for my final portrait session of the month as I photographed the Larsen family over at Roosevelt Park here in Waukegan.

I had a little bit more of a social life during September than I’ve had in some months recently. The first Saturday in September ended up being a busy, fun filled day where I caught up with quite a few people that I hadn’t seen in awhile. The first event of the day was attending the party in my backyard for my neighbor’s daughter 2nd birthday. Once the party was winding down, I went to hang out with my buddy, Carl, who I hadn’t seen in a few months. Then the final stop of the night was hanging out with another buddy, Raul, at his cousin’s birthday party.

Then, the Thursday before my busy weekend was a fun day as well. I won tickets compliments of the City of Waukegan Chamber of Commerce to see the screening of Napoleon Dynamite followed by a question and answer session with Jon Heder (Napoleon), Jon Gries (Uncle Rico), and Efren Ramirez (Pedro) at the Genesee Theatre. I ended up inviting my friends Celeste, Julio, and José to come along with the tickets I won. Also joining us were our friends, Rmneet and Taylor, who had bought tickets for this screening when it was initially announced months ago. We all even got to sit together since Julio used his connections from when he worked at the Genesee to get it so we got some good seats altogether.

Now the reason why I mention that September brought a mixture of emotions is because I lost a friend , Jennifer Schneider, to suicide. She was one of the kindest and sweetest people I’ve ever met so the news of her passing caught me off guard. It was just a few months earlier when I was surprised to find out that she was back in the area when I ran into her at a local environmental rally. Then a couple weeks after that we met up for coffee and discussed a wide range of topics. She seemed optimistic about the future and talked about having the opportunity to have a fresh start. I never would have thought that would be the last time I’d ever see her.

August 2019

My photography work for the month of August came over the first couple weekends of the month. And maybe even by the end of the month of September I’ll be caught up on posting and give a more in depth story of my August photography gigs. For now I’ll tell you that the first Saturday of the month, I traveled to Indiana to photograph a wedding. Then, I felt blessed that the second weekend of August because I did not have to travel far from home for my photography gigs that were both in Waukegan. First, on that Saturday I photographed a birthday part for a three year old’s birthday. Then on Sunday, I photographed a wedding over at Bowen Park.

My social life was rather quiet during the month of August. Lately, I’ve been opting for staying in and working on my business rather than going out. These days growing my business is my top priority so it’s probably going to be mostly the same for my social life in September. The only social event that’s on the agenda for this month is birthday party for my downstairs neighbors’ daughter, Ely. Other than that during a game night this past weekend, there was talk of having another game night later in the month.

I’m happy to say that my schedule for photography in September is a bit more busy than my personal life. I have one weekend that is very busy in the middle of the month. On Friday the 13th, I will be heading up to Osh Kosh, WI, to photograph a wedding. Then the next day I have two events on my schedule with most my day spent in Chicago at the Field Museum photographing Faith in Place’s Green Team Summit and VIP reception. Once that’s finished, I’ll have to see how quickly I can make my way back to Waukegan to take photos at a birthday party. Other than that busy weekend, I may have a couple family sessions the last weekend of the month.

July 2019

The month of July was certainly more of a month of work than play. There were a few times where my photography took me took familiar territory. With the first gig of this month it was the fact that I was photographing my former hairdresser, Maria, and her family. The next two gigs the familiarity sprung from the fact that they took place at a location, Bowen Park, that I’ve been to on numerous occasions. Granted, they could not have been two more different jobs. The first was a 6-month milestone portrait session that had originally been planned for June, but ended up getting pushed back due to the weather. To contrast with that, the other work I did at Bowen was capturing a wedding ceremony.

The end of the month ended up being a little busy for me as I had three different photo jobs in the last week. Last Friday I had motivation to get my studio space back in order as I had someone stop by to get some basic photos for a modeling portfolio. Then on Saturday, I traveled up to the Menomonee Falls, WI area to photograph a wedding. To close out the month, I had a portrait session for a pet turtle of all things at Bevier Park. I’m trying to get back more into blogging and tell you at least about some of this different shoots that I had in July.

As previously stated, my social life was certainly more low key during this month especially when compared to last month. The most noteworthy social time was the second weekend of July. The weekend started a little early for me as I took Friday off since it was the day a bench at the Waukegan Public Library was getting dedicated to my maternal grandparents. The next day, I checked out Scoop the Loop with some friends since it was happening in downtown Waukegan. Finally, I closed out that weekend on Sunday by getting together for game night. Other than one busy weekend I didn’t have too much going on in my social life.

Currently I don’t have much planned for the month of August. The only things on my schedule are photography gigs the next two weekends. First, there’s a wedding that I’m photographing tomorrow in Crown Point, IN. Then, I have a party that I’m doing photography for the following weekend. Meanwhile, I don’t have any definitive plans as far as social engagements. I’m debating whether to catch a concert or two, but there is nothing definitive at the moment. Well, until next time. hope all is well.

March 2019

I don’t feel like the saying “March comes in like a lion and leaves like a lamb” is accurate in terms of my month of March. My month had an interesting bit of variety to it when it comes to my photography. Early in the month I participated in a photography meet up hosted by Chi Shooters and We Out Here Gallery. Maybe this week I’ll end up getting to editing the photos from this event. The other photography meet up that I was planning on attending that was hosted by Visions Meet Up was cancelled since the host had an emergency that had to be attended to.

March 16th was a busy day for me that involved photography and my first time doing video work. In the morning, I was helping out the Ray Bradbury Experience Museum doing some video work during the Illinois Reads Book Festival that was taking place in town at the high school. Then, later in the afternoon I did some more video work during the dedication of Ray Bradbury Park as a literary landmark. Once that was finished my responsibilities set in as a photographer and I headed straight over to Undercroft Gallery to be there during ArtWauk that evening.

On the business front, a decent amount of progress is being made as I continue to try to promote my business. I am getting very close to securing one last wedding at my reduced rate that I was offering since I was portfolio building. So right now I have a bit of work to do as I’m planning on promoting my services at my new price. In March, I even had the honor of being the photographer for Dennis and Dareth Reed’s wedding. Be on the lookout for blog post about that some time down the line.

On social front in March, I got out to the sectional game between Waukegan and Stevenson. If you follow the Waukegan’s basketball team, you know it was sadly a loss for Waukegan. Granted, there are few things that can are quite as exciting as high school basketball at the Dog Pound in March. I also always consider running a gallery during ArtWauk to be a social event since I can usually count a few friends coming through and visiting. My final bit of fun for the month was going to Chicago to catch Emancipator at the Chop Shop in Chicago.

For the rest of the month of April, I don’t have many plans for the coming weeks. Right now one of the main events on the schedule is participating in ArtWauk on April 20th. Then the week after that, I’m going to be doing photography for a 50th wedding anniversary party out at Illinois Beach State Park. It is nothing too new for me as I normally am not much of a planner so I’m eager to see what this month has in store for me.

January 2019 is a free trial month

At some point during this January I saw the meme “I’ve decided that my 2019 will begin on February 1st. January is a free trial.” This idea has resonated with me a bit so it’s stuck with me since I first saw it. If we go along with this line of thinking, I hope you all had a good trial month and are ready for 2019 to know really begin now. For myself, January a bit of a mixed bag, but I’m looking forward to what the rest of 2019 has to offer.

The month of January went pretty well in regards to the business side of things which has me feeling optimistic since this is generally regarded as a slower time of year. I started the month by doing headshots for the Schuler Scholar Foundation’s Career and Internship Fair at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel in Skokie. It was very cool working for Schuler since I am an alum of their organization. I also had a couple portrait sessions them month with an engagement session at Lincoln Park Conservatory and a senior portrait session in my studio. My last gig of the month was doing photos for the induction service of Lucy Villalobos, who is a neighbor of my parents.

One of my main goals in the new year was being more social and meeting new people. On one hand I did go to a few more events than I normally do, however, that unfortunately did not result in meeting as many new people as I would have like it have. I feel like the upcoming months will be better for meeting new people as I’ll be more willing to go out as we move past cold, snowy weather that winter brings. There have been a few times this month where I skipped going out because I didn’t feel like dealing with the elements. I’m going to venture a guess that I’m not alone in having a preference to stay in at times for this reason.

Right now, my plans for the month of February are pretty open ended. For my business, the one plan I have for this month is participating in ArtWauk once again with my work on display at Undercroft Gallery. Otherwise, I don’t have any upcoming gigs this month so I just have to get to work on promoting my business in the mean time. I feel like it’s likely that things will be moving in a positive direction with my social life this month. The only semi solid plan I have is to try to attend as many Waukegan High School basketball games as I can this month. For the most part, I’m the type of guy who doesn’t plan too far ahead and instead makes plans as they come along so this month probably won’t be much different and I’m sure I’ll fine some fun adventures.