So-called Professional

Up at 4am this morning - I love this first day when I am not working. I sleep all day Monday and then try and sleep as much as I can Monday night, which last night was from 10.30 pm till 4 am. So now at 5.30 am I have showered, fed the dogs, started the laundry, made breakfast and have started my second cup of coffee. This is the time I love because I can sit and catch up on my favorite photography blogs and forums before I leave the house at 7am(ish) to catch some of the waterbirds that arrive in Buckeye and settle in the streams.
Today, I have read a very interesting blog entry by David DuChemin - which made me smile (Confessions of a So-Called Pro) - because it made me realise that it is ok to occasionally ignore the "tech stuff" - to forget to clean your sensor is not a life or death issue, to mismanage your exposure can sometimes be a positive experience and only using 1% of photoshop is ok... because sometimes a shiny piece of equipment distracts you, or because you become engrossed in your subject or because you would rather be on the porcelain throne reading about tripod heads than actually learning about histogram curves (as important as they are). So, let's raise a glass for those of us that do not count ourselves as professionals and never really expect to be classified as such, for those of us that get up at 4.30am full of enthusiasm because "I just want to make images, man". For the others, the people that get paid to do this, you can sleep easy knowing that I am thoroughly enjoying my hobby without stressing that my bokeh is not as attractive at f5.6 as it is at f4.