Tips

How To Share Photos With Your Loved Ones

I tend to be the main photographer at family gatherings. This is because I have a wonderful camera that takes nice photos, and because I love snapping away and recording these events. I usually end up with some nice shots, and then the problem becomes: how best to share them? My family usually wants to see and download the pictures to be printed or saved, but it’s sometimes tricky to find the best way to accomplish that!

Emailing generally doesn’t work – attaching the photos takes a long time, and you can only send a couple in each email. I used to use primarily Flickr and Facebook, but my family has said that it’s time-consuming and increasingly difficult to download pictures off these websites. When you have grandparents who don’t love technology at the best of times, sending them confusing emails with five sentences of download instructions for Flickr pictures is not the best method! They’re not so good at the right click, options, download thing for each picture. They want one straightforward method to get the whole bunch.

So after Thanksgiving this year, I was determined to find a way to share my pictures that would let my family download them easily to their own computers and then look at them or print them however they’d like. I found a couple great solutions to this problem, which I’ll present in a hierarchy of needs! Enjoy, and happy sharing!

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Writing: Inspiration & Motivation

Since my last post about writing, I’ve been trying to incorporate writing into my day-to-day life. I think I’m making some progress, and that makes me feel so happy. As I said in the last article, writing is something I want to practice, improve and enjoy. I want to make it more of a priority! And I think I’m being successful so far, so I wanted to share some of the things that have been helping me with my goals.

Inspiration

I’ve been really drawing inspiration from the world of writing over the past week! I’ve written out about a dozen cards, filled with great quotes about writing. There are some great resources for quotes here and here. The cards are scattered around my workspace, and my eyes tend to fall on them while I’m spacing out from work. Great system so far!

I’ve read some great articles about the art of writing! My favourite is a piece from The Guardian about various writers’ top 10 rules for writing. There are some contradictions, definitely, but it’s so interesting.

I watched Finding Forrester a few days ago, and definitely got some inspiration! It was wonderful to take a look inside (albeit a fictional) writer’s life, see how they work and what they suggest. His line: “write your first draft with your heart, re-write with your head” is a great one that will stick with me for some time. I hope to watch some other films about writers, like those listed here.

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Battling Writer’s Block

I spend a lot of time moaning and complaining about how I just can’t think of anything to write about. When I relaunched my website last March, I made a vow to get serious about my content: to be more helpful & insightful.  This was a double edged sword of a proposition: first of all, it’s less fun and a great deal harder to write something important than it is to make a fun list or post pictures. Which means I ended up posting less, and agonizing over my writing. The flip side is that my content became a good deal more useful and hence rewarding for me to write. While I’ve since come to realize that my blog is a space for both types of posts – the easy & the helpful – it’s still hard to write.

And this doesn’t just apply to my blog. I’ve been trying to gear myself up for NaNoWriMo for years now! And yet every time the 1st comes around I just don’t..write. I just put it off. I make a barrier in my mind, with a sign which reads: “I can’t think of anything to write about” and then that’s that.

The thing is, I feel so good when I write. When I finally sit down and say to myself: “write a blog post..now!” and the words start to come, it feels great. I love the feeling. When I publish something, I get giddy. I’ve had blogs since middle school and written short stories since I was very small, but I’ve never made any effort to consciously improve my writing or my writing habits. I’ve never taken a creative writing course, or any type of writing course besides high school English. Yet writing is becoming increasingly more important to me. Which is why I think it’s time to start battling my writer’s block and taking the process of writing more seriously!

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Shifting Your Focus

Here’s something I’m sure you can all relate to: sometimes I freak out.

Sometimes I worry about myself: how I’m dressed, where I’m going in life, my grades, my comportment. I throw pity parties, on occasion, and whine about how hard my life is (read: not at all) to anyone who will listen. I get into “moods” and at times conduct myself in the manner so succintly outlined on the First World Problems Twitter page.

And while it might sound stupid or dramatic or ridiculous, I really have been struggling lately with living too much inside my own head, thinking too much about my own worries and fears.  I’m sure you can all agree that once you’re in a mood, the funk is dark and twisty and it can be fairly hard to bounce back. Developing coping techniques to deal with such moods is not an easy task, even for the most confident among us.

On the other hand, though: I have to remember to count my blessings. And I have so many of them to count. Which is why my favourite new coping technique is about shifting my focus to others.

Here’s the idea: start thinking about anyone but yourself.  Anyone. Put them at the center of your thought target and fire away! What resonates most with me personally is the idea of making someone’s day, and helping people in my life as much as possible. Maybe you’d prefer joining in with a protest that moves you, contributing to a charity you believe in, volunteering for a local organization that does great work, or sending letters to the people that you love. Maybe you just want to start collecting smiles, or hugs that you helped create.

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