I just finished reading a book called "Pomodoro Technique Illustrated" by Staffan Nöteberg (http://www.amazon.com/Pomodoro-Technique-Illustrated-Really-Minutes/dp/1934356506). I guess it's a little premature to say that it's changed my life, but in my first week of truly implementing the method, I find myself on Thursday and have already accomplished more than I had mentally apportioned to get done for the whole week. A couple of months ago, I had read the free PDF by the original author and decided to test it out, but in typical fashion I sort of did it half-ass.

Last year, my friend Sara asked me about my resolutions that I had for 2009. For some reason, I took it very seriously and wrote a lengthy post about my resolutions. I accomplished most of them to some degree. I'm not going to worry about the ones that I apparently wasn't as resolute on as I could have been. But we both enjoyed the process so she wrote me this year for my 2010 resolutions. And here they are...

It's time for New Year's Resolutions! I usually don't do New Year's resolutions - I do vacation resolutions. It's on a trip that my head clears and I have some time to think about what I'd like to change in my life. This year, though, for some reason, I have a ton of New Year's resolutions. And I have to admit, I'm pretty excited by them.

We had our final photography lighting class. The assignment was quite open ended: EVOKE AN EMOTION It is now time to take all that you have learned up to this point and put it together into strong evocative images. Images that show you can control the mood and voice in your lighting technique. No pressure.

This week, our assignment for class was to photograph food. He gave us the general guideline of using natural light in the background and a reflector in the front to capture the light. I think I did pretty well at getting the subject to really pop with the reflector. I took some shots without the reflector for comparison and they came out a little too contrast-y - and not in a good way. The reflector gave the food a nice glow to it.

I'm a bit behind on my posts about photography class. Week 6 was all about black and white photography. I was hoping to bring in some male nudes, but all of my friends were shockingly prudish! I'm trying to figure out if that's because in the age of the internet, people just don't want someone to take nude photos of them. Or perhaps none of my friends trust me. Or perhaps the younger generation just isn't as comfortable stripping for art. Hmmm...

I missed the 4th week of photography class, so I'll jump right into week 5. This week in class, we started using soft boxes - which are big boxes of fabric you put over a light to direct all the light in one direction. There's a flat white part where the light emits, which diffuses the light.

The third week of photography lighting class, we worked on beauty lighting. We set up two stations with a tripod and a strobe light. We later added umbrellas to the mix to see how that affected things.

I have always wanted to be a better swimmer. I can manage to splash about and get somewhere when I need to, but I never really took to the water. A few years ago, I got a weekly swim instructor. He definitely helped, but I still felt like I struggled with the water a lot. And it was exhausting. I could only do a few short laps at a time without stopping to wheeze. I didn't know how people could swim lap after lap without stopping. A friend told me that I should learn to relax in the water and not try to swim so fast. Whenever I tried, I would sink, get water up my nose, etc.

The first review of my homework for my photography lighting class went well. He gave me a specific challenge: to photograph objects instead of people. I clearly enjoy photographing people and he wanted us to start working outside of our comfort zone.

I came home from Israel with several goals. Most of the fitness goals are well in progress. I had also decided it was time to take a new class. I loved the photography class that I took at NYU, so I looked for a new class along those lines. I narrowed it down to a photographic lighting class and a portrait class. The lighting class seemed to have a more broader application, so I signed up for that.

I'm writing this from Israel. Once again, Israel has totally knocked my socks off, but in an entirely different way. When I was here before I was primarily struck by all the religious sites. This time, I'm struck more with the people. Israelis generally have the reputation of being loud and pushy people. Yes, that's true.

I just finished taking a month long photography class. I had been talking to my friend, Tom, about my photography skills. I felt that after I got a high-end DSLR camera, that my photos actually got worse. I had no idea what all the buttons were for. Every time I tried to figure out f-stop and shutter speed, I'd take lousy photos. I really needed a class to get me into shape. We looked at a few classes in the city. In the end, we took a "Digital Photography Workshop" from NYU. The instructor was Emmanuel Faure (http://www.emmanuelfaure.com/).