Brenda Landrum Photographer » Brenda Landrum is a Fine Art Lifestyle Photographer in the Northern Colorado area.

For awhile now I have had many different emotions about life & business.  It is so incredibly difficult to balance work and family, especial when that work is always with you.  It can become an obsession.  Always worrying about emails, Facebook, Twitter, my blog, my website, and how I may be coming across on all of those things.  I usually only release the good stuff, you know upbeat posts about my day and recent images I have taken.  I more and more am struggling behind closed doors.

Over the last week, today especially, I have found a few posts others have made public about how they have had to step back.  Sarah Rhoads post hit me like a ton of bricks.  She talked about how she was effected by posts others were making on twitter and Facebook about how great business is and how that made her feel like she was never good enough.  I’m right there.  I see others great success and how fast their business is growing and I feel like I’m stuck.  Then I start down that ‘why not me’ road.  A very sad road to be on.

Fear.  It has made me insecure.  I am one in a sea of many and navigating that is hard.  How do I show who I truly am?  I am sure I do not come across well online.  I never get the reaction that I am hoping for.  I’m completely unsuccessful at getting my readers engaged into conversations.  It is kind of hard to converse when all I’m putting out there is ‘here is this awesome photo I took today!’ or ‘I finished my to do list by 10am!’.  Being real with all of you is frightening.  You can only imagine how many times I have read this post as I’m writing, deleting and editing and reading again.  I have decided though that I need to come clean, get real, and get personal.

Today I made a spreadsheet.  That’s right a spreadsheet.  I am now going to force myself to only focus on social media for one hour pr day during the week.  This may sound like a lot (I think it does) but when my iPhone dings and pings every few minutes with something someone has emailed, pinned, posted, or tweeted I bet I spend hours in these black holes.  I am hoping that by stepping back and limiting this exposure to noise that I can regain my confidence and focus on what is more important.  I have all these ideas and changes that I want to make in life and business.  So I have created a routine for my day to help me focus.  There is time to focus on my family, my house, myself, and my business.  A time to email and a time to pin.  A time to put puzzles together with my daughter and a time to watch a movie with my husband.  Sounds crazy right?  I think so too but I’m determined to take back control.

It never gets old going to the Denver Butterfly Pavilion.  We have been going every year since I think my daughter was ONE, she’s now SEVEN, and I think this trip was by far the best time we have ever had.  We arrived shortly after they opened and the butterflies were incredibly active.  The sky was thicker then I had ever seen it with butterflies floating around the conservatory.  What made this visit so much fun was that the butterflies were not shy at all and would land on us repeatedly.  Now they say to not touch them as the oils on our fingers would damage their wings but they would land on us and we would wait until they would decided to fly away.  Just wait until you see the huge butterfly that landed on my daughter!!  Then as we were leaving a little butterfly decided that it was not time for us to go.  He landed on my shirt and would not get off.  After some clever maneuvers to get him off he then landed on my daughter and then on my husband.  Finally he flew away and we were able to walk out.

All images were taken with the Fuji X10 camera (I will be doing a review soon) and processed with VSCO Film.