Can someone find me a genie???

I have decided I need a genie. I will henceforth be rubbing every lamp, teapot, bottle, pickle jar, milk carton, etc until one appears.
This week I did some invitations up for an evangelism event our playgroup/bible study is putting on. I started with wine and cheese on the front since it's a wine and cheese evening but then I got the title from the speaker and decided that it may just look like we were inviting them to an AA meeting. I had a great time doing this! I really miss that sort of work, I miss editing my photos, I miss having the time to take great photos, I miss having kids that would co-operate to get their photos taken (I got maybe the first 3 months out of each of them), I miss all things photography.

I have actually been embarrassed to admit on here that I once was a photographer because of the state of many of my photos I post on here. I say “once” and it makes me sound like I’ve retired and now I just potter around the garden. No, I did the degree, got the letters after my name (have never actually put them there) did a stint as a clinical photographer, needed to give that up to do the mission work that we love and unfortunately have pushed the photography further and further aside. I have been asked to do endless weddings but I’d rather gouge out my eyes than hand myself over to overbearing mothers and bridezillas and meddling family and questions about why I didn’t take any sunset photos “because my friend had sunset photos and they were really great but you didn’t take any…” when it would seem obvious to me that if you had your wedding at 10am there wont be a sunset to take photos of. So, I hand the weddings over to other photographers and wait for someone to commission me for some piece of fine art or some great graphic masterpiece or well funded medical research (okay, my tastes are a little eclectic) but it just isn’t coming. So this week I am doing some staff photos for a friends company. Eeeeek, photos of people. But I need the time to do more of this, I always feel relaxed after I have messed around with photos, I feel like I have had some time to myself but at the same time I have been doing something “useful”. So here’s where the genie comes in. I need three wishes…

1. Time. I know that isn’t in the rules, I’ve seen the genie movies, you can’t have more time, they can’t bend time, turn back time, stop time or anything like that but I need them to, just for me. I want time for all the regular stuff that you need to do with photography but I also want time to spend on my black and white work. I want to be in the darkroom, by myself, with some good music, printing up pieces that I love.

2. Opportunities. To be paid for doing the photography I love would be great, unfortunately for the casual photographer the money is in the people shots. Weddings, portraiture, that sort of thing. Made painfully obvious by the fact that my works from uni are almost all hanging on my walls instead of being sold to well paying customers.

3. Chocolate. Okay, not really related to everything else but that never ending packet of timtams would be great!!!!!

I could possibly add a faster computer to the list to handle the editing stuff but if I had the chocolate I could cope with whatever this beast of a computer dishes out!

I have always imagined my walls filled with beautiful black and white images of my family that I took, I developed, I printed by hand. I imagined teaching my kids to use a REAL camera and showing them how to develop and print their own black and white works of art (still time, I would never let them in a darkroom at the ages they are now). I have a darkroom, it's just not at my house and is currently storing a lot of stuff of mine and other peoples.

So if you come across a genie, HE’S MINE!!! Send him this way and I’ll give you some of my timtams!