Dear First name / Friend,

How are you? I hope you had a good weekend and are looking forward to summer sun, green landscapes and amazing photo shoots. I know I am! 🙌🏻

I'm currently recovering from a bit of burnout. I don't want to be too dramatic about it, because that's not my style, but I've been learning the hard way that there are limits to how long I can sustain a heavy schedule of work and travel. After a long week of work in California and a stressful flight situation home, I slept a TON last week. Like full nights of sleep plus hours-long naps each day! 😴 

After this weekend, I finally feel caught up and ready to wrangle my schedule differently by scheduling time off and limiting the amount of things I say “yes” to. Saying “no” to people is very hard for me - I LOVE DOING ALL THE THINGS! Can you relate? 😁

Many years ago, when I was primarily a wedding photographer, I read the book “Fine Art Wedding Photography” by Jose Villa. He shared about a type of light I hadn't heard of before, which he called “Skylight.” He described it like this: 

"I create my best compositions when the sun is setting. When the sun has just dipped below the horizon, all you have left is residual light in the sky. I call this excellent light 'skylight.' It’s not directional, so I can move around my subject a full 360 degrees. No matter what angle I shoot from, the light on the subject is exactly the same."

I actually disagree that it's not directional, because there is more luminance coming from the horizon where the sun just set (as you can see in the image above), but I love that about this kind of light! 

So when is the best time to use this kind of light? I use it when I have a difficult location without good shade or when a client suggests a location, but the light in that location is not ideal for portraits when the sun is still strong. Once the sun dips below the horizon, you can go anywhere and have good light to work with!

But there are a few things to keep in mind…

1. This is a low light situation, so your ISO needs to be higher than before the sun went down.
2. This light only lasts 10-15 minutes before it starts to lose it's luster, so you have to work fast!
3. You have to stay past your scheduled end time for the session, but it's usually worth the extra few minutes for this soft, dreamy light!

Try this out and share one of your resulting photos with me!

WHAT I'M READING

I am working my way through several books right now - one personal and one business, so I didn't finish either. 🙈I generally read right before I sleep, so being tired lately means I get about 2 pages in and I'm out!

But related to my opening thoughts about rest, here are a few good articles about finding rest and pacing your work:

• A Quick Plan for Better Rest Shawn Blanc
• On Slow Productivity and the Anti-Busyness Revolution Cal Newport

WHAT I'M LISTENING TO

• How to Market Your Horse Business My new favorite podcast! Denise has a ton of great episodes rich with tips and ideas for how to market your horse business. I'm excited to be a guest soon!
• The Pressure to Produce A thought-provoking podcast episode from David DuChemin on managing the constant pressure to be producing great work.
• The Productivity Hack No One Talks About from Hair of the Dog. It's not what you think!

Now that it's warm and green outside, my focus will be on doing shoots for commercial and branding clients and for my stock photo library, along with preparing for my Pegasus Retreat in July for 6 the amazing photographers in this year's Pegasus Mentorship!

I have some fun educational projects in the pipeline, but will likely not have them ready to launch until fall. 

Past versions of this newsletter are now available on my educational website on the Free Resources page.