Michelle Monk Photography

We’ve attempted this gardening thing a few times now.

The first year we had a BUMPER crop of squash – crookneck, zucchini and even one unknown variety – it was coming out our ears!  Our church friends ducked their heads and ran when they saw our mini-van pull up beside them.  We couldn’t give it away fast enough.  I was looking up recipes faster than I could cook them.  We had not planted the squash plants far enough apart from one another and we would have rogue squash that would hide from us and grow to gargantuan sizes.  Monk and I would absolutely roll when we would find one of these monsters that had quietly grown into Squash-zilla without our knowledge.  I would grate these zucchini beasts into 2 cup portions and freeze it for zucchini bread later.  We had a lot of zucchini bread that year.  A lot.

The second garden we put out managed to produce a manageable amount of squash and a beautiful crop of tomatoes.  Big, glorious tomatoes were EVERYWHERE!  Until the tomato bugs got to them and managed to eat giant holes in them in a matter of days.  I wanted to cry.  The bugs were so bad that year we finally just tilled the whole thing under.

We haven’t even put out a garden the last two years because … well… I was pregnant in both 2008 AND 2009.  But this post isn’t about my fertility so we won’t go there.  However, 2010 has been baby-free and we decided to give it another go.  I’ll admit, we’ve already started off on the wrong foot by putting the garden out almost a month late, but we decided if we used already established plants and not many seeds then we could have a pretty good go of it.

(These pictures are about a month old, but I needed to post them so I could give a new and improved update of the garden at a later date!)

There is just something about flowers and vegetables and seeds that just gives me such a thrill every spring!  Am I the only weirdo out there that digs this stuff?!?  Get it?  Digs?  Oh, I slay myself sometimes.

Even though we planted late, I have high hopes.  Especially for my herbs!

It blows my mind every year that something this simple can turn into something edible.  Just shows the glorious Creator that we have!   These are cucumber seeds.  I am hopeful that I will get enough pickling cukes to can some bread and butter pickles this year!

And every time we do this, I say to myself, “will anything really grow?”.  And it always does.  Well, most of the time.

We had some new help this year.  She dug the dirt.  Oh, the puns, the puns!

But mostly she felt compelled to conquer the slide.  The wrong way.  Because that’s how she rolls. Or slides.

I am always really impatient at this point.  I want to grow something … now!

And what could Fat Otis possibly contribute to the garden?  Do you really want to know?  It’s like one King Kong sized litter box for him.  He’s been sprayed with the hose a time or twenty-six.  Right after I planted some herbs next to the house he walked over and squatted like he owned the joint.  He was removed from the scene in a rather unpleasant manner.   I still can’t help but love him though.

Come on little tomatoes!  Grow!

And now all we can do is sit back, water and wait.  Water and wait, water and wait, water and wait.  Did you get that?

Just in case you didn’t …

it’s water and wait.

I’ve started this post no less than 5 different ways.  I’ve said the same thing multiple times, tried to sound smart, tried to be funny and then banged my head profusely on the arm of the love seat.  My brain is refusing to cooperate with me and my eyeballs are about to burst from their sockets into fiery flames from looking at this computer screen.  My wit, my brains and my ability to reason cease to exist tonight so now it’s just time to speak from my heart.  Run while you can.

This photography business thing is hard sometimes.  Especially with a family.  Please believe me when I tell you I’m not complaining because I’m not.  I’m just learning balance.  Unfortunately I’m dragging you fine people right along with me while I’m learning this, so occasionally you have to listen to me think out loud.  Like now.

I’ve always felt that if you do what you love and your passionate about it then if will never ‘feel’ like a job.  I never dreamed in a million years that this business would take this much work.  (Delusional much?)  There’s so much more to it that just picking up a camera and taking a nice picture.  Especially when I feel so passionately about it.  I don’t want to just take a mediocre picture, slap my name on it and charge a few bucks for it.  I want to offer something that’s high quality and meaningful, not only to my clients, but to myself.    I want to put a little piece of ‘me’ into every picture I take and most of the time it’s wonderful!  And capturing other peoples memories and adventures and special moments makes me feel like a total rockstar!  And then…. sometimes it just doesn’t happen that way and the pictures are just okay.  And then I spend days beating myself up over it.  (It’s dumb, I know, but apparently I get some sort of satisfaction over this self-deprecating wallowing because I still haven’t learned NOT to do it.)  And in those moments, photography has ceased to be a passion and has now become just a job.

And in the meantime … while I’m either rockstar-ing out or wallowing and busying myself with how I’ve totally failed as a photographer and now it’s become a ‘job’….. my life begins to pass me by.

My ‘Other’ life.  My pre-photography life.  My most important life.  My family.

I tend to get so wrapped up in my photography business that I forget I have my own adventure to photograph.  I have my own special moments to capture.  Heck, I have my own personal practice subjects right in front of me and I don’t even notice.  Because it’s ALL ABOUT THE BUSINESS.  Or so it seems.  But God always has a way of bringing me back.  He always has a way of putting things ‘back’ into perspective for me.  And then I remember what a beautiful life I have right before my very eyes!  The passion comes to life again and once again I remember the reason why I loved photography in the first place.

At that point, the fact that I am MONTHS behind in blogging what I’ve been photographing just doesn’t seem to be as important as stopping and taking pictures of my own life.  My messy, chaotic, sometimes fun and sometime not-so-much-fun life.  And that’s where I am.  Whether you come to this blog to see my work or you come to this blog as my friend or you come to this blog because you stumbled upon it, I hope that it says to you that I love my family!  I hope that it tells a story of not only my photography, but my faith in God, my quirky, good humored husband and all six of my wonderful children!   I love what I do and I hope and pray that the Lord will continue to bless my efforts in it, but the fact of the matter is … photography is not my life.  It’s what I do and I AM passionate about it, but sometimes I’m just not gonna post about my latest session.  Sometimes I’m just going to post about my garden or my children playing with the hose or my cat, Fat Otis or my love of all things Target.

Because that’s who I am.  As a person AND a photographer.  That’s my life and I love it!  And because THAT part of my life makes me so happy and means so much to me it can’t help but overflow into my photography life.

It’s win-win really.  For me and you.