Until Next Week

Even though the year is just beginning, tomorrow my holiday officially starts!

I was going to do a few posts in advance and have them upload automatically during the time while I am in Thailand but then decided against it.  It would have been very easy to just go through my older images, select a few and post them with a few random thoughts on each.  Nice, but no – so I decided to just drop a few images in this post and leave it at that.  Even though I am psyched and ready for 2010 and have a lot of very exciting projects lined up I decided that I need a complete break from the blog in order to return with a whole fresh view, thoughts and approach to my blog posts.

In a recent post I wrote about sharing your work and I still stand by this, however…

We all reach a point where you feel like your inspiration bucket is running empty.  You start reaching this point you need to look at ways to refill this bucket.  You need to find a way to keep your own passion alive so that you can keep on creating, giving and most of all enjoy what you do.  I am very very happy about how Photo-Africa has been growing and it is only just the beginning.  Even though things are on the up, in a big way, I can feel that I have taken many images and written a lot of blog posts and this break is exactly what I need.  So tomorrow I am off to Thailand where I am going to eat lots of noodles, take a lot of tommy-tourist type images and just allow my inspiration bucket to fill up again.  One of the things I am doing when I get back is to reorganize my wildlife portfolio and this will in itself be a nice exercise which will lead to a whole different way of thinking and many new blog posts.

Tomorrow is Thursday so while I am sitting on a plane to Bangkok you can check in for the guest post.  You will recall that a few weeks ago Morkel Erasmus did a post on HDR and based on the positive response it was a great hit so tomorrow you can join Hougaard Malan as he gives you a whole different way to blend your HDR images in Photoshop.  Hougaard Malan started photography as a hobby in 2007 at the age of 19 and quickly fell in love with the genre of landscape photography at which he truly excels. Completely self taught from the internet, he progressed quickly and exchanged his hopes of becoming an engineer or architect to pursue a career in photography.  He funds his photographic endeavors through the stock industry and has been studying until the end of 2009 and will be shooting and travelling full time from 2010 onwards.  Hougaard’s work is out of this world and the step by step tutorial will give you an insight to how you can also add this little bit of extra pop to your images.  Inspiration deluxe and with a lot to learn make sure to pop in tomorrow.

I will be back next week Thursday to get back into the full swing of things.  Tutorials, assignments, workshops, guest posts, and of course wildlife images galore.  There are a lot of exciting things happening on Photo-Africa but for now I am going to say goodbye until next week!    I will still be doing the occasional update from Thailand on my Twitter page but otherwise enjoy the guest post tomorrow and if you have any specific topics or discussions you would like to see on the blog let me know.  Lots of ideas – endless possibilities!

Until next week!

Gerry