7/24/10 -CHRIS AND DAVE

Beautiful, fun couple that loved to get the whole family involved - that means the dogs too!  How can you not love that?

NOTHING BUTTER TO DO WITH MY TIME!

Yes, yes, yes!!!! I did it finally!  I got out that cream separator that i got for christmas way back in 2009 and put it to work!  Now my hesitancy, and I do this a lot, is that i keep thinking that its gonna be a pain the ass to do and that i don't have time for such shenanigans, so i put things off.  Now let me explain why i wanted a cream separator: because i wanted to make cream cheese, and butter and other cheeses that require cream, and ice cream. Goats milk is naturally homogenized and you have to use a cream separator because it doesn't separate like cows milk does. Now cream separators cost like upwards of $400- $500 and that's a lot of dough!  So i searched and searched on Ebay and finally found one for only $250, brand new but it was coming from Prague.  Well, it arrived for Christmas and with it came the directions: in Czech!  So Kristi, my step daughter was here at the time and because she is a scientist and very intelligent woman - quite like myself (well not the scientist part), we deduced that we could figure out how to make it work!  Well, a few gallons of spilled milk later, we did - all centrifugal force.

But what i remember was it was a pain in the ass and so when the goats started milking again, i figured it was too much work and that when we used 3 gallons of milk and only got like a cup of cream - well it wasn't worth my time.  But the other day i was reading in my recipe book, "Goats Produce Too!",  that in order to separate the cream, the milk needs to be 90 degrees for efficient separation.  Well, maybe that was our problem!  So i got out the cream separator, 6 half gallons of milk, and went at it!

That's why the towel is there- spillage! Looked like a remake of above.

Well i forgot that the machine had to be warmed up as well in order for this process to work, so as i poured the milk in out it came through the hole in the side that is there for some reason, can't remember. This is when one is grateful for their dogs, they came and lapped up the spilled milk. : )

 But once the machine warmed up from the warmed up milk, i remembered!  So with udder delight i heated the milk one half gallon at a time and poured it into the separator and all this beautiful cream came out - very quickly and efficiently!  Couldn't believe how much cream i got!

1/2 gallon of cream from about 2 /12 gallons of milk!  Wow!

Now I have 4 1/2 gallons of perfectly skim milk!

Look at all that beautiful cream!

So i got all excited and decided to make butter! YAY!

So i got out a jug, poured about 1 1/2 cups of 50 degree milk in there and started to shake.

About a half hour later, i had butter!

Now it doesn't look like it yet, but it is!

I rinsed the butter in water....

added a little sea salt and pressed out the remaining water.

and Wa-lah!  Butter! Yes, that is butter: goats are more efficient at converting carotene (which gives cow's butter that yellow color) in their bodies, that's why it is stark white!

I was so excited i even labeled it with and exclamation point!

Now tell me, who really gets excited about butter?  A desperate goat owner, who farms, and has nothing butter to do with her time in the cold, dank winter's of MN?  oh i mean better...or do i mean butter?

CARPE DIEM!

Carpe Diem!

It was morning and sometimes I like a change in pace when it comes to breakfast food, this morning it was my left over Subway sandwich.  I set the tasty, meat encrusted sandwich with ‘the works’ of veggies on it on the counter.  I also needed to get in the shower and found myself looking at the empty towel shelf frowning.  I headed down stairs to the laundry room to retrieve a towel, it, mind you, was no longer then a total of one minute in elapsed time from the moment I left the sandwich on the counter, retrieved the towels from the basement and returned. Yet, as I round the bend, there! There lay the thieving hound, formally innocent brown eyes now bulging with guilt, tail tucked between her quivering legs, the smell of the finest subway meats still on her breath. 

What? Amazing! That in a split second really, an animal can attack and effectively eat a large sandwich.  I also found it amazing that in spite of the fact that even though they must know they will never starve; that they receive bounteous servings of kibble, twice a day, every day, not to mention the sporadic generous helpings of treats periodically given when there is a leftover crumb on our plates after a meal; they still seem to think that their very existence relies on taking what they can, when they can or they will die. This is the pure brilliance of animals – they cannot help themselves.  They live in the moment. That sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do when you gotta do it! Carpe diem! Seize the day!

Perhaps all of us should live our lives a little more like my dogs and seize the day. Dogs don’t let their guilt or fears stop them from seizing the moment; they don’t have any limiting beliefs stopping them, and I admire this about them.  We as humans tend to ignore those moments of precious time we have, those fleeting moments because we are focusing on other things or what has to be done. We must embrace the possibilities that the present does hold. We need to seize the moment and make the most of every day.  To treasure every moment of life means living in the present moment, after all, the past is gone and the future is yet unknown. 

Are you missing out on the "right now" because you're moving too fast, dwelling in the past or worrying about the future? If you're not living in the moment you risk letting life pass you by. Start paying attention to your thoughts, your feelings and your surroundings at this very moment because it is the only moment that is guaranteed. This is all there is, this is all that counts: right now!

Here are six ways to help you to be in the moment:

1. Slow down:  Life is short and we move too fast through it. Pause every now and then and take it all in. Stop and smell the roses.
2. Really taste it: Instead of eating to satisfy a hunger, experience food as a pleasure. Whenever you put something in your mouth, savor it.
3. Stop and observe: Notice the people and things around you as they are not how you wish them to be.
4. Soften your focus:  getting caught up in details can be stressing.  Ask yourself, “Does it REALLY matter?”
5. Forget the little things:  and trust me, they are all little things.
6. Breathe:  so often when we are moving through our day we forget the first and foremost thing we have to do: breathe!  When we get upset we tend to clench our teeth and breathe very shallow while trying to force what’s not working to work. Try taking one long, deep breath. It will relax you and refocus you. It works!   

Another would be to just imagine yourself as a dog:

   

BOREDOM FROM WINTERDOM

So the other day, another boring winter night, i decided to play with my camera (i know what else is new, right?) So i am sitting on the Lazy Boy and am thinking of the new flash i am getting for my camera this week.  I hate flash, always have, no matter what you do - it looks like flash.  Not natural, the way our reality is, but fake, bad.  So this will be my adventure with the new flash; trying to make it look real!

But anyway, i am sitting there playing with the on camera flash (which really stinks), when Maddie walks into the room.  She is eating a morsel of food for a slight snack and when this occurs in our household, a creature of some sort will not be far behind.  And in Maddie's case that evening, like many other evenings, she had the gamut of creatures: hounds, pigs and cats.  I took an image - with flash - yuck!

see? overexposed in the front, backlight too dark...ugly! (ignore mess in living room)

So i decide well, lets see what i could do - raise the ISO, play with the shutter speed:

Better lighting but then again, blurry (unintentional).
Animals move too fast for a slow  shutter speed to be effective.

But then it got me to thinking: "how fun would that be to work on some long exposure times??" Yes!  So i played for a little while and this is what i got:

Must - hold-  camera - still. try again....

 Still without a tripod - blurry but i am playing here so its ok.

Nicer - got the ghost effect i was looking for.

So i have just decided that i need to head on downtown at night and start doing some long exposure images.  But its supposed to get down to negative 10 this Monday.  Don't think that will be fun to do in the cold, darnit!  Mother nature - please bring me some warmth soon!  Snow is ok, but 20 below is not acceptable.

BULL-HEADED AND BLOODIED

Yes, i have bull headed goats.  Not very often does it happen, they are usually docile creatures but i think they have cabin fever like i do.  So last night at feeding time i go out to the goat barn, get all the horses fed, throw them goats some hay and out comes Ezzy to get her grain and be milked.  She hops up on the milking stand and as i go to grab the chain to lock her in i notice red!  Bloody red!  Yikes! "What the heck did you do now?"  I ask her, no response. Why can't someone ever answer me when I ask a question???

This reminds me of the time a few years ago when at morning chores i found a large 4" x 4" piece of her skin dangling from the side of her body!  She looked like a halloween decoration! We never did figure out what happened there - but we think it might have involved someone else's horn.

yes, here are the nasty looking pictures:

Now really, would a family squabble be that bad as to head butt a family member so hard that you put a hole in your head?
I think to myself, "Well this should be easy to figure out who the opposition was - look for blood on their noggin."  So i am also thinking, "Gosh another wounded soldier out there."
I look around at all the other goats, only to find one with a little red on the head - Demeter - her granddaughter!

Gee, what kind of grandmother head butts her granddaughter?  What was the quarrel about i wonder? She wouldn't tell me, la sigh.
















It looks like Ezzy got the rough end of the blows, barely any blood on this girl and no open wounds.


But now i have to clean up Ezzy, so i go get some hot water out of the granary and wash out the wound.  Problem is Ezzy hates her head touched.  See- she has this scur. Scurs grow when a goat is disbudded (burning the horn bud)  and it is not done properly. Occasionally a new growth will emerge called a scur - a misshapen horn - which should be removed and to remove it you just take some pliers and pull or sometimes the goats just shake their head and off it comes.  But Ezzy thinks this hurts tremendously so she refuses to let me get near her to pull it off anymore.  So now she is head shy.

So after fighting and bloody water splashing everywhere, i get her cleaned up and spray the wound with - what else- Wound Kote.

Now she gets to walk around with a purple dome.

Life on the farm!

BARN CATS REVOLT!

I know something is up when the barn cat comes to my window. This is Winky. She has been with me for 12 years now.

She decided to become a barn cat when we moved here 

and she has not come into the house since.

Obviously, she needs something.

I am not responding quickly enough. 

 I have just been given the evil eye by a cat.

"Now you must suffer, i will come right through this window 

and scratch your eyes out!"

Mmmwwwwwwaaaahahahahahahaha!

She didn't succeed.  But i figured she's probably out of food out there.

Which was almost correct.  When the hay guy delivered the hay, he shut the barn door all the way and she couldn't get in under the door to eat.  Very upsetting.

So after this, I started thinking....how cool it would be to be a cat! 

For 10 reasons:

1. You have claws - that can cause damage to people and objects
2. You can give someone the finger one minute and come back a little while later and love them and they love you
3. You have amazing agility - you can jump up onto an object the size of a golf ball and stand on it!
4. You can purr - how cool is that??!?!?!
5. You can sleep for 20 hours a day and no one will give you a hard time about it
6. You don't have to write papers for school
7. You don't have to go to school
8. You can eat whenever your hungry
9. You can get love whenever you want it and whenever you don't want it you don't have anyone complaining
10. You never have to take a bath

I think overall, when i go - i wanna come back as a cat.  Cuz that's good living right there.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A MONEY MAKING ADVENTURE - NOT!

I found this through Facebook and thought i would share:

Do Professional Photographers Really Make Money?

Posted in heather lilly photography blog 99 comments

I’ll never forget within the first week of quitting my newspaper job (in February 2006) I was at the gym and someone asked me what I do for a living.

“I’m a wedding & portrait photographer” happily rolled off my tongue.

They perked right up and said “oh that’s a GREAT job! I bet you make a lot of money, since most weddings are like TWO-grand! And you have the weekdays off!”

Even at that point, I knew I wouldn’t be technically be pocketing that much per wedding and I knew I would be editing and marketing Monday-Friday.

But I had NO idea how the actual breakdown of a professional photographer’s fees would be.

I get a lot of inquiries asking about business tips or photography tips. I even have a workshop that allows these eager minds to pick my brain for a day.

But I wanted to set the record straight right here on my personal blog about being an artist: it isn’t glamorous (unless you become very, VERY famous).

I stick to my career because it is my passion and I can’t NOT do it. It’s how I think and everything around me inspires me to continue doing it.

With that being said, here’s a breakdown you may have never thought about.

Taxes - Remember when you were a teenager and you got your first paycheck?  I do. I was getting paid around $5.10/hour and after doing the math was expecting a paycheck for a certain amount.  As I opened it, I thought “what…on…earth?!”  It seemed short. Very short. Looking at the bottom of the stub, it showed the breakdown of why my check was about 30 percent shorter than I anticipated. Good ol’ Uncle Sam.

When a bride & groom cut a check for their photographer, about 30 percent of that check AUTOMATICALLY isn’t the photographer’s for the keeping.  It’s Uncle Sam’s.

My husband (the numbers guy) is diligent about transferring over this set percentage to a “tax savings” account. So at year-end, I have that tax money ready to hand over.

*added note: I realize that this seems like a high percentage. My husband & I agreed on his amount as a goal (not obtained 100% of the time) because we would rather have too much left over than not enough. If there is money left over, it goes into owner’s draw or towards a nice luxury overhead item at year-end.

Overhead – Being a professional photographer is DARN expensive. Beyond the normal phone, fax, computer, office supplies, website, etc. overhead, there’s membership fees, license fees, marketing, cost of prints & albums*, massive backup drives, insurance, seminars to stay on top of the latest trends, Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop software (and yearly upgrades) – I could goON & on about this category.  It’s kind of the invisible category that people tend to overlook but it allocates a whopping 30 percent of every dollar that comes my way.

*a note on COGS*: I realize that cost-of-goods-sold is another category all together, but to me it is a percentage related to money that comes in & it is money that I “spend” to do business… that’s why I have it roughly plopped it this category.

Even with a home-office & studio, my overhead is upwards of several hundred dollars a month.  And this doesn’t include attending any awesome workshops or upgrading my computer. These are what I consider “luxury overhead” items and I only get to do them if I I have covered the essentials, have given myself a cushion for the next month, and make over a certain amount each month.

Equipment Savings – This is another overhead, but it’s so critical, it has it’s own category.  It takes a LONG time to save for a new camera body when you stash 10 percent at a time away.  Let’s put it this way:  a Canon 5D Mark II (with insurance & a warranty) is approximately $3,000.  That is 10 percent of $30,000.   If each wedding is $2,000, that’s 15 weddings. Or, if each portrait client spends $300, that’s 100 portrait sessions.

I realize equipment is a tool, but I also don’t advocate credit card debt (even though society does)…

I personally cannot actually handle that kind of volume (alone) without outsourcing or sacrificing quality of product.  (So, obviously, I need to make up for that in sales… that’s another blog post all together).

So when you hear a photographer getting a couple new big-ticket-items: camera body and nice L lens, you know they have either

a) saved for a year to do so

b) invested much more than 10 percent (borrowed funds from another “category”).

I guess there is another option there:

c) they have a sugar momma or fund their business with personal funds.  (And last I checked, I think they call that a “hobby”…)

Retirement - Ya, I want to retire someday and I thank my lucky-stars that my husband is so patient with me finally realizing I need to always, always put 10 percent of each check that comes in the door into the 401K.  Seriously, I can’t be hauling around 20+ pounds of gear in my senior-citizen days.

Taking retirement, college/vacation savings & the owner’s draw: money in your pocket category, that totals 30 percent. I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a corporate employee putting 1/3 of their “take home pay” into their 401k.  So it does feel like a lot to save, because it is (proportionally speaking).

Savings College Fund (-or- Vacation Fund) – Maybe you don’t have a kid [yet], so you can call this your vacation fund. Either way, you will want to have a little nest-egg and 10 percent* is a nice round number to work with.

*a note on this: if you don’t have kids & don’t go on vacations, yes: this amount goes into your pocket… it is owner’s draw, but most people would love a getaway to recharge their batteries. Consider this percentage an investment in your mental health.

Owner’s Draw – Owner’s Draw means money in your pocket. It’s like you are taking cash out of the business cash drawer. This is the category people often assume is the big one.  Nope. Maybe it is for your business model, but it isn’t for mine. Of course if I have a really good month, I’ll do the Happy Dance and want to spend a little extra on something my husband and I have been saving for, but in general, 10 percent is what I actually get to “pocket.”

Owner’s Draw isn’t always for fun things, however: this is also to pay our personal bills (*sigh* adult responsibilities).

So in case you haven’t been adding all this up in your head, here is the breakdown:

• Taxes 30%
• Overhead 30%
• Equipment Savings 10%
• Retirement 10%
• College Fund 10%
• Owner’s Draw 10%

Equals 100 %

For ease-sake, let’s drive this point home with a cut & dry example:

$2,000 for a wedding:

• Taxes 30%  $     600.00
• Overhead 30%  $     600.00
• Equipment Savings 10%  $     200.00
• Retirement 10%  $     200.00
• College Fund (or Vacation Fund) 10%  $     200.00
• Owner’s Draw 10%  $     200.00

Even when you lump Retirement, College Fund (or Vacation Fund) and Owner’s Draw into ONE category, that is $600 for a $2,000 wedding.

If you are doing the math and thinking, Heather: stop complaining! $600 / 8 hours of shooting = $75 per hour…. erase that concept from your mind!

There’s countless behind-the-scene hours that go into a wedding. I don’t just say that to make it sound like “so much work” goes into what I do, so I can charge more.  It’s completely and totally legit.  I tend to invest 60 hours of time in one wedding (start to finish: i.e. consultation, engagement portraits, travel, preparation, wedding, editing, album design, etc.). Most of that time is editing each image, but that’s my style and business model.

So, if you confirm that math $600 / 60 hours = $10 per hour.

And for every $30 dollars of that, I’m not even touching $20 (into 401K and college fund it goes…)

One more example. It’s pretty common for NEW photographers to charge for a session and images on CD. Let’s be generous and say they are charging $200:

• Taxes 30%  $    60.00
• Overhead 30%  $    60.00
• Equipment Savings 10%  $    20.00
• Retirement 10%  $    20.00
• College Fund 10%  $    20.00
• Owner’s Draw 10%  $    20.00

Hmmm, “pocketing” $20 for one session is kind of depressing.  They probably spend 6-8 hours (maybe longer) on shooting and editing this session.  For example-sake: if they spent 6 hours on it, they are making $3.33 / hour.  YIKES!

If you made it this far, you are either really excited about numbers, you are curious why photographers are “so expensive” or you arestruggling with finding a balance with your photography business cashflow.

My answer? It’s not easy but I hope this breakdown helped put some perspective on what you need to do.

In the mean time, you can check out my work and help me send Little Dude to college by clicking over to my photography website and photography blog.

PS- Feel free to share this blog post & give credit to me by linking back to this post.

PPS- I realize everyones business model will vary, but many pro photogs will agree (once they crunch their own numbers), this is pretty accurate for the industry.

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