Well, the month of July seems to have slipped past me without my having ever made a single post on this blog. So sorry. Bad blogger! I’ll try now to summarize what has been a busy month, even if it involved very little travel. And interspersed are a few images from June’s trip to Hot Springs, Arkansas. I have a couple of other posts from Arkansas in the works, so stay tuned.

So what happened to July?

Good question. It was there and then gone. For me it’s been a month of getting caught up in the office — prepping files and sending them off to stock agencies, doing a few design projects, prepping a couple more books in my “Journals of a Travel Photographer” series — and, perhaps most importantly, getting prepared for what appears to be one of my busiest Autumns ever. I’ll post more about that as things become more finalized but, suffice it to say, I’ve been buying travel guides for multiple countries. I’m super excited about the months ahead.

But I also didn’t want to push forward with future work at the expense of past work. I’d been getting behind in stock submissions and images don’t sell themselves when they’re just sitting on a hard drive on your desk. And, if I needed more encouragement, my stock sales are actually up this year. Alamy is the agency that I can most easily track because I can log on for immediate reports and they have been doing very well for me this year. At the midpoint of 2013, I’m about where I was for all of 2012 and my average price per sale has increased for the first time since 2009. I’m not back up to those 2009 prices, but it’s comforting and hopeful to not see image prices continuing to drop. We’ll see if the trend continues and if it’s reflected at my other agencies but, in the meantime, it felt like time to “feed the beast” and get more images out there. My backlog isn’t entirely caught up, but I’ve made progress.

August looks to be the turning point for me and my assignment and travel schedule is quickly heating back up. I’ll try and get my blog posts caught up before I get too swamped. I have a couple of things from Arkansas in particular that I want to share before new destinations distract me. And I hope to be announcing more books in the very near future. Two are in proofreading and two more are nearly to that stage.

Then, come September, things will get really exciting around here.