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People fall into to one of two camps on New Year’s Resolutions, they either love them, or hate them.  I fall into the later camp, and last year was probably the first year in a while wasn’t super clear on my goals. Coincidentally, I probably felt the most “aimlessly wandering” I’ve felt in a while.

So with that in mind, I wanted to jot down what I’d like to accomplish in 2010. I think all are obtainable goals, mainly becuase I’ve done them all before:

Finish a marathon

I actually ran in two in 2007, Chicago and Grand Rapids. In many ways, I’m further out of shape than I was when I decided to attempt my first.  Still, I’m going to select a race and put together both a pre-training plan (get to a point where I can run enough to even start a marathon program) and the training plan.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention following Anne’s journey to finishing the Lakefront Marathon last fall was a big inspiration. Reading her go through training and ultimately cross the finish line got me thinking.  I miss running, I’m not happy with how far I’ve slid since completing the Grand Rapids marathon. Next year I am doing something about it.

Publish a photo a day

I did this back in 2008 in my first foray into Project 365. I got a lot out of the experience, but it was definitely a lot of work.  I think I’m up for the challenge again.  I’d like to use the project to refine my workflow and hopefully not get the huge backlogs I did last time, where I’d publish two weeks of photos in a sitting. The fact that I’ve had a few people ask me about this has motivated me further.

One thing I might try this year, but probably not for the whole real is James David Duncan and Mike Clark’s new site – The Daily Shoot. The idea is your receive a new photo assignment everyday via Twitter, then need to post that assignment to their pool.  Interesting concept that I plan on trying out.

Update this blog

I’ve hinted at this over the past month or so, but I’d like to get back into writing down my thoughts in more than 140 character increments.  I plan on documenting both above goals here.  If you’re still reading this blog, thanks for enduring the massive dry spell. I do plan to freshen up the look and feel a bit – I’ve got a ton more imagry I can be featuring, so if you only read this via RSS or via Facebook “notes”,  be sure to stop by the site once in a while. I promise to keep it interesting.

This list is not exhaustive of my goals for 2010, there is a lot I’d like to do around the house which I won’t bore you with. I also have somethings in the works that I can’t make public yet.  Nonetheless, I really hope to share my progress on everything and really do appreciate the encouragement I’ve gotten both publicly and privately from you readers. Keep it coming.

I’m still here, but between Twitter and becoming a freelance web developer, this place has fallen into neglect, though I’m thinking about changing that so stay tuned.

We’ve got registration open for PhotoCamp Milwaukee.  Head over to http://photocampmilwaukee.org/register to sign up and I’ll see you at Bucketworks on May 2, 2009!

I’m currently on my way back from attending the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, TX.  This was the first time I’ve attended the event and it was everything I expected and more. I accomplished my main objective, to meet a bunch of new people in the web development and design industry and there were many informative sessions.

I’ve got a bunch of photos from the closing party that I need to process, as well as other photos I took around Austin.  Watch my SXSW 2009 Flickr set for updates

It’s gonna take a while to fully digest everything I took in, but I’m thinking about presenting some of the material from the panels I attended at a future Web414 meeting.  Stay tuned.

I inadvertantly “launched” my photography site today when I sent an image to WMSE to use from their excellent chili contest this past weekend. I told them if they wanted to give my photo credit, they could link back to my new photography site, which as of this morning when I left Brookfield for downtown Milwuakee was almost ready to go.  They got back to me with a hearty thanks and told me the image was on the front page (I got lucky and snagged a photo of the winning restaurant).  I went to see it and saw the link, and that is when it hit me that I was about to get traffic.

I scrambled to get the rest of my content shaped up and am actually pretty happy with the site.  I’m probably going to start full on marketing in a week or so.

If you’ve watched any of the Olympics, you’ve no doubt seen the masses of photographers covering the event. (All those lust-worthy white lenses.) Vincent Laforet is covering the games for Newsweek, and while I’ve known he’s been blogging about it, I really haven’t been keeping up with my feed reader lately (work has me pretty busy right now).

If you want a sense of what it’s like to cover the largest sporting event, go read his post that he filed on covering Phelps historic 8th medal win and the men’s fencing final. Looking at the photos he has up, he was in that scrum of photographers that Phelps climbed through to hug his mom and sister.

We got some rain this weekend.

Well, more than “some.” When I left for work this morning we’d measured over 8 inches at our house. So far we have faired well, we only got a little water in the basement when a window well filled up. Turned out out gutters were clogged. After I stood on a metal ladder in a lighting storm and cleaned them out, we were ok. I wish I could say the same for our neighbors. Further down the street several people had the sewer back up into their basements. The city put a huge trailer mounted pump on the street and started pumping the sewer into the storm sewer.

The first photo at the left is from down the street. Underwood creek basically has left folks with as much as four feet of water in their backyards. Here is some video I shot with my cell phone (narrated by my 21mo son), followed by some more photos:

You’ll recognize these first two images from Project 365. Other than Saturday morning, the weather is about all I had time for this weekend. At the right is underwood creek as it flows across the street from our house. Normally it is maybe 5 feet across at this point. The sound when you stand on our front door step is like living near a waterfall as this shot is of the calm part, the rest are like mini class 3 rapids.

This is the foot bridge near the playground at Wirth Park, upstream from us. If I had to guess, normal level is about 4-5 feet less than this. I am thankful I’ve only had to deal with some minor puddles in the basement and having to drain water off of the pool twice. One neighbor down the street estimates he lost $100k worth of stuff when his basement filled with sewage.

So far, it sounds like everyone is safe, just wet.

Getting my weather geek on:

Another try at an 18mo portrait and this was the best of the bunch.  We ultimately decided on ordering prints of this and yesterday’s shot.

Here is an outake that was pretty funny:

My youngest heard a train horn (we live sort of close to some tracks – they’re about 1/4 mile away) and proclaimed “choo choo” and then started tugging on the box with all the trains in it.  So we got them out and he played with them up until bedtime.

This is my favorite train in the set, the green one’s name is Derek.  Here he is having a conversation with Sir Topham Hatt, the dude that runs the show.

Yes, I’ve lost it – I’m photographing toys.  Worse, I hated the lighting in the living room, so I broke out my lighting kit.  This was lit with a shoot through umbrella with a SB24 @ 1/4 power.