It was three weeks ago now that we as a staff team at Qwanoes set off on a crazy adventure. Once again we had a Juniors camp, ages 9-11 years old. All I have to say, those kids are crazy! How can an adult seriously keep up to those kids! Wow.One thing that stuck out this week was meeting a camper which I have seen so many times in a photo that I took, but had never met. This week I finally got to meet him and talk to him and get to know him a bit more. His name is Charley, and every-time I looked at him I could not stop thinking about the one photo I took of him back last year. That one photo, changed my entire outlook on a camp counselors roll here at camp.Staff Develpment Day:This year for the first time we had a day where we as a staff team could take in a collective breath and breathe out. A day that people have been asking for, for a very long time.This day for me was not spent relaxing though, I spent the day working on a slideshow that was to be shown at the evening Q-town for the staff. From the get go I was slogging away at it and it seemed to be going quiet well. Pictures were popping out to me as the right ones to put in, but then the crunch time started to happen. 30 minutes before Q-town and I barely had the slideshow in a see-able state. It was a mass of slides smashed together in a unrecognizable mess.While the events of the evening were unfolded in Q-town, I was working on organizing the slideshow into a cohesive manner. While that was happening I seemed to have moment of sudden panic strike me. It was like having all the wind knocked out of you. I had never experienced this before, nor do I want to again. Luckily it went away as quickly as it came and I was up.The slideshow went without a hitch (once I turned off Nocturne). People loved it and the whole sense was that people were ready once again to get at it and give their hearts and time to these campers.A time past:Well it has come and gone and I still haven’t had a chance to post this! We are going into our first night of Junior High #2 and I hope to get this up tonight. The rain is coming down in buckets and it’s the first camp this year so far that we’ve started off with some rain. I do hope that it goes away soon, as I have many subjects to shoot around the camp for promo material and sun is always a good thing.Time to get on with the evenings events!

Here I am, in the main office waiting for my daily reviews to stop printing wondering to myself - “Should I actually take time off this summer, or should I just slug through and get as much done as I possibly can?” Then it hits me…It’s 12:00AM in the morning of the last day of Juniors #2 and a day before our staff development day and I still have at least 2 hours of work to do! YARR! Maybe I should take some time off!12:30AM - As I work through my thoughts and ideas on what worked and didn’t work from this past week, I wonder if anyone even noticed that there were certain things missing from the usual. Did they really notice that I was so busy or distracted that I didn’t get a Kitchen, Dishpit or Maintenance photo? Oh wait, yes they did and they even voiced their displeasure at me.Now I could take that and be completely discouraged for the fact that my co-workers don’t realize that I work alone and have no-one else to help me OR I could take that and think about how much this job actually means to them. The fact that they take time out of their day to voice their opinion to me and realize that I am not there to capture their part of camp. I take that as an encouragement! They really feel that my images mean something! That to me means that my passion for taking these images shows through.1:00AM - Printing off the daily reviews to put into my “jordan’s random photographer thoughts binder book thingy”.As I look through the past 3 weeks of pictures on those pieces of paper I become reminded of how long ago they feel, yet at the same time, I feel like the kids are still here because I remember their faces so well. It’s a bitter sweet reminder of how much these kids impact our lives as staff as much if not more then how much we impact their lives. Kids are amazingly simple yet complex beings that bring spice to the lives of us dull adults.1:30AM - Well that’s another day done here at the “Q”. It’s time to lay my head down to sleep and dream about the whacky crazy adventures that will happen here next week at Camp Qwanoes. Thanks for sharing this time with me in the main office.

Of course like my usual A.D.D. self, I’ve been trying to find a better way to use Lightroom in conjunction with other programs at the same time more fluently. It’s all about productivity here! So I went to the drawing board to see what would be the best way to maximize time and the physical dimensions of the program on 2 screens. Here’s what I’ve come up with…

Basically I work with many more programs at once then just Lightroom. For example at any one time I will have iCal, Mail, Lightroom, iTunes, OmniFocus (Alpha), Photoshop, Comic Life, etc. open. Now you might be asking yourself, "Why would you need all of those open at once?" It comes down to this, I have a terrible memory and I need planner specific programs open to remind me of what I am supposed to be doing, then there’s of course the photo based programs, and basic inefficient programs

So with needing to be able to connect with all these programs all the time I decided to shrink up the Lightroom screen real-estate (Yes, I hear the shrieks of terror) to allow for more room for other programs.

Now if you were like me, I used to use Lightroom with all the panels out in the open. Now with this new smaller version I had to say goodbye to the panels in order to create more space for my pictures to reside. I turned on "Auto Hide & Show" on all the panels so that they just pop out when I place the mouse cursor over the edges of the window. As well I got rid of the toolbar with a swift kick of the "T" key. Now I have an amazing amount of flexibility with Lightroom to play with other programs that I need access to.

Now to some, this was a no brainer what I just explained. To others like myself this is a great way to keep Lightroom out on my desktop while at the same time being able to have full access to all my other applications that I use in with or away from Lightroom. Yes, this may not work for someone on a single monitor setup, you’re probably better off with making Lightroom as big as it can go, but for those lucky ones, this work wonders on a multi-screen setup!

I hope this helped a bit to create a more productive desktop for yourself when needing to use multiple programs at once when browsing the Lightroom.

Well, it’s about time but I finally got around to updating the Qwanoes 2007 - Lets Go Portfolio. There are now 31 images to view in the new postcard format.Just as a quick note - if you are experiencing some issues with loading the new images, just clear your browser cache and hit refresh.

It’s that time yet again. Another camp has come and gone, 370 more kids have had a crazy week filled with sugar, salt water, and tons of high flying rides. It’s time to reflect and take that deep breath I’ve been waiting for.Ok so now that, that is done with, what’s next on this list of things to do? “Well why don’t you work on your infamous wall of inspiration” you say? Nah I don’t think so, I think that today will be a day to merely relax, and reflect on what makes me do this. Cause seriously, to any logical human being working 14 hours a day for 9 weeks straight with only 3 days off is rather ridiculous especially combined with the pay we get. Who in their right mind would want to do this?I have one answer for you: to have the chance to help a kid be a kidYes, this wall that I have been working on is helping me in an indirect way come to this conclusion. The constant reminder of seeing kids escape from the everyday North American life and go have an adventure. What’s the point of being a kid without having crazy adventures? I don’t really know where I am going with this or where it came from. Just some random glob of messy goo in my brain that has been wanting to get out.It’s all about kids.

Do you ever get to the point of being totally uninspired to go out and shoot? Well lately I have had one of those. After shooting a lot during the first week of camp, I had a bit of a burn out from taking more pictures. This disturbed me a bit, why would I not want to go out and capture what was going on when so many amazing things were happening just 30 feet from my office? Well, after a bit of coffee and some cookies from the Tuck shop I decided to force myself into a creative mode. What came out of that time was great!I took out a binder and some paper and just began to write down some of my dreams for what I wish I could do here (ie. How could I redesign my office, How could I capture a campers first time getting up on a wake-board?, etc.). Then I took those and put them into two different rows. Things that I could do right now and things that I want to have happen in the future. Then from there I came up with a wall inspiration for myself. I began to go through my library of pictures and pick out all of my favorites, converting them to black and white then printing them off on 11×14 sheets of paper. From there I began to post them up all over the walls of my office.This wall has begun to be quite the inspiring wall not just for myself but other staff around me. Being able to look up from a mundane computer desktop and see pictures of memorable moments that happened here is so invigorating. It’s like a sip of cool water for the creative soul. I would encourage anyone to try this out sometime. Take a couple hours and sit down and create a room of inspiration. You’ll thank yourself in the long run!

Well it seems it came about as quickly as it went. We had a grand time in our first week of camp!This week our waterproof case for the camera came in so I was able to play around with it. I mean, I was able to professionally assess the quality of product that we purchased. Ok fine, I definitely had a great time with it. For the first time here we are now going to be able to capture underwater shots. So stay tuned for some of those!It’s now my turn to sit down and keyword and organize 4000+ moments that were captured. I hope to also have some new images up on the folio soon