On the road trip from Portland to Syracuse, we stopped for a couple days at Ojo Caliente, a hot springs in northern New Mexico. This was during an early morning walk there.

We have resettled in Syracuse, New York. Whew. What an effort. The transition started last May and just ended a couple weeks ago. The last stage was a stupendous month-long, 17-state drive across the country, stopping to visit friends and family and talk to students and faculty at Northern Arizona University, Missouri and Western Kentucky.

We’re still unboxing things in a new house and Deb is getting ready to start teaching at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communication.

It’s exciting to enter a new realm and saddening to leave the many friends we’d made in Portland. That city is so special.

The past few months have been busy ones editing a wonderful range of work, on top of moving, which has left little time to write. Now, I can return to periodic posts here and concentrating fully on working with photographers, just in time to help you wrap up your year.

That’s right, contest deadlines are fast approaching. There is still time to flesh out the year’s work, finalize stories and projects, make pictures that can push your body of work to new levels. But it takes a concentrated effort.

As I’ve written in the past, one of the greatest benefits of contests is that they present the opportunity to assess your year’s work, to think about what worked well and what could be better if you change some things in the coming year. Getting an honest, complete, impartial, precise and compelling edit of your work is the critical thing. Maybe you can do that yourself, or you have friends or coworkers to give that kind of guidance.

If not, I can help. Contact me: m at michaelddavis dot com

Stay tuned for more regular posts here. And if there are specific things you want me to write about, drop me a line.