“Nothing has happened on your blog for a while now, and there’s nothing from you on the usual internet forums either. Is everything all right with you?”. I found this message from a good friend in my inbox this morning. Yes, everything is fine – perfectly fine, in fact! 😀
As most of you will have noticed, Sabrina and I have been the proud parents of a perfectly healthy baby boy called Tom since mid-December. And only since that day have I been able to understand what my friends always meant when they told me that I would miss out on the best thing in life if I never became a dad. I used to think to myself, “Of course, let them talk, I seem to have a different disposition” – but since December 15, 2011, I see the world with different eyes. Thank you, Tom! 😀
Over the course of the last year, I’ve done an enormous amount of “preliminary work” and am therefore doubly enjoying taking it easy at the moment and spending as much time as possible with Tom. Lately, I often think back to my “former life” as a commercial employee – a life in which I couldn’t organize my time freely, but sat in a stuffy office from eight to five (and often much longer). At the time, I would only have seen a fraction of the little one growing up. Fortunately, the reality is quite different; I hardly miss a breath. Not a single development step has passed me by so far, I get to see everything “live”, as I’m always just a few meters away from Tom here in the study. I am very grateful that my life is the way it is! 🙂
But of course I don’t spend the whole day observing Tom’s development – no, of course I also continue to photograph him. Over the last few weeks and months, I have once again organized many photo seminars for beginners and advanced photographers at the weekends and, of course, had many introductory talks with couples who are getting married in 2012 and 2013 and whose search for the right photographer has now come to an end. However, 2012 is largely “closed”; only six Saturdays are still free until the end of October! And since another couple will be coming for a preliminary talk tomorrow at noon, there may only be five left from tomorrow… 😉
Of course I will be accompanying a bridal couple to the Seychelles again this year to say “I do”. A bridal couple – at least that was the plan. I photographed five weddings there last year. This year I only wanted to photograph one wedding in the Seychelles so that I could spend as much time as possible with Tom. No sooner had I made this decision at the end of December than I found the “right” couple at the beginning of January, who will get married on La Digue in November. After a visit here with us, the two immediately agreed. And so it is that I will be flying to the Seychelles at the end of October to photograph the wedding of the two Cologne residents for three days – and then we’ll be adding another two and a half weeks of vacation, because Sabrina and Tom are accompanying me to the Seychelles!😀 😀 😀 But this is not the end of the “Seychelles story 2012” – because as of today it is now certain that I will be photographing another wedding on Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles, at the beginning of October. After the super nice phone calls with the couple from the Black Forest, I just couldn’t say “no”. If I wasn’t photographing three more weddings here in Germany in the second half of October, I could almost stay in the Seychelles… 😉
Oh dear – this was supposed to be just a short “sign of life” – and now it has mutated into a novel. Sorry for that! I now jump into the bathtub with Tom. See you soon! 😀