Believing in yourself and finding new opportunities at taekwondo camp

     Over the weekend we had the joy of taking Vagabond Photography on the road to Steven's Point, WI and teaming back up with our friend Alyssa Fencil. Our project destination was a taekwondo camp hosted by Five Rings Martial Arts with special guest Rio Olympian and part of Team USA, Stephen Lambdin. It was a great multi day event and being able to be a part of it was enlightening and fun as always.

I always say you need to love your job and if you love your job it will never feel like work. Covering events like this is what I mean by it. To be around so many energetic people who want to be where they are at that point in time is really eye opening and refreshing. I cannot say enough about the owner of Five Rings Martial Arts Steven Decker and Olympian Stephen Lambdin. Watching them work with students from the ages of six all the way to the mid 40’s, one can see they believe everything they talk about and it’s not something they do because they feel they have to. The one on one time and direction is something truly amazing and you can see when what they say is actually getting through to the students. At the end of the day, through Stephen’s talks and workout/training sessions, everyone was able to come away with something to help them become better.

“Believe in yourself and at first if you fail you have to get back in there and try again” is one thing I took away. Another is “It is okay to lose. It lets you know what you need to work on.” That second part is something that is vital I think to most photographers. This is something we should remember when we enter into photographic competitions and don't place as well as we think we should. It’s not that we are horrible photographers but it shows us there are parts of our craft that we need to work on.

In the end the best memories from this weekend’s events are the laughs, the sounds of feet meeting outstretched pads, and the few bruises or badges of honor (which I was sent a photo of earlier today) that we take away until the next time we gear up to do it again.

Sweet Water Clean Rivers Clean Lakes Conference

This past week was a very fun week for Vagabond Photography we had the opportunity to team up for a second time with a great non for profit group call Sweet Water (http://www.swwtwater.org/). This time we were covering their Sweet Water Clean River, Clean Lakes Conference at Discovery World on the Lake Michigan water front. They are a fun and insightful bunch of people, trying to do a wonderful thing by organizing groups and companies and raise awareness to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed to bring it back to swimmable and fishable conditions.

The reason why we really like what they are doing over at Sweet Water besides the obvious is because it gives us the ability to photograph our clients in new(to us) and cleaner locations, in the past we would of passed by because of how dirty and unsafe they were.

Also while at the convention two of the afternoon presenters were from Detroit and Toronto. They both went into detail on how cleaning and restoring/reshaping the water shed in their cities brought people back to the waterfront and revitalized the area. We think this speaks to what Sweet Water is trying doing in our area which we believe can greatly benefit people in general and especially our clients.

The other part of why we this think this is a great thing is, in being good stewards of this blue spinning marble we all live on it is our duty to keep it clean for future generations so we don’t just flush our lives down the proverbial toilet.  In our free time at Vagabond Photography we like to spend our time fishing, swimming and hiking around local waterways so groups like this have a special place near to our hearts. Having grown up around the paper mill belt along the Wisconsin River we can remember times when cleaning operations were under way we would not think about swimming or eating a lot of fish out of the river. Though now it is a great river to go out and have fun on year round. So it’s nice to see several groups trying to clean up the Greater Milwaukee watershed.

We cannot encourage people enough to go over to their website and see what they are trying to do to help clean up the Greater Milwaukee Watershed.