March 2020

Reinvent yourself this Lent

The best portrait photography from Venture Studios…

In our last article we looked at the tradition of Pancake Day – or Shrove Tuesday – and shared our top tips on food photography.

But as we mentioned in that article, the day after Shrove Tuesday is the start of Lent. Its official name is Ash Wednesday and this year it occurs on Wednesday 26th February. Ash refers to the Christian tradition of wearing ashes in the shape of a cross on the forehead to publicly express penance and faith.

Whatever Lent means to you, it can be a really good time to take stock of your life. It is almost two months since New Year and your resolutions. Hopefully some of them will by now be well-established habits; but others may have fallen by the wayside and perhaps need a bit of a reboot.

So the period of Lent – which leads into spring and continues until Easter Sunday, 12th April – is a time to move things forward. A time to re-evaluate and ensure that you are going to be the person you want to be in 2020, and therefore make it into the year you want it to be.

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You can view Lent as a challenge to step aside from the treadmill of daily life and decide on some goals that you really want to achieve during this period. These goals will be personal to you, but some examples could be:

• Giving up something that you are too dependent on. Not mindlessly, and not just for Lent. But changing your mindset. So for example whether you comfort eat, drink too much, or really want to give up smoking, Lent is a great time to start doing that.
• Establishing a habit that you know will be good for you. Examples include eating more healthily, getting more exercise or going to bed earlier.
• Making firm decisions and plans about the next stage in your life, whether that is to do with relationships, family, changing jobs, studying, moving home or travelling. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and feel unable to make the changes that you really want to. Lent could be the time to start changing all that.
• Decluttering your home and your life. Have a look at the 40 bags in 40 days challenge for inspiration on how to go about this.
• Getting involved in serving others. There are numerous ways you can do this but check out 40 Acts for ideas on how to be generous to others during Lent.

Whatever your goals this Lent, one really good way to record your progress is by keeping a journal. We covered the concept of journaling in our article Journal your Uni Life.

Whether you choose to keep your journal in a notebook or on a digital device is totally up to you. But your Lent journal can be a place to write about any or all of the following:

• Your goals for Lent
• Your goals for 2020 and beyond
• How you plan to meet these goals
• What is and is not going well
• How you are feeling
• What decisions you need to make
• What problems you need to overcome

In our visual world, it is really helpful to include photography in your journal as well as words. Take a look through our fabulous gallery to get some ideas on styles of photography that you may want to include in your journal.

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It’s important to include photographs in your journal right from the outset, so that you have a before and after record at the end of your journey through Lent. Just imagine before photographs of your cluttered house, or your unhealthy habit or your tired face …. then the contrasting after photographs of how much you’ve managed to change during Lent.

Good luck with your Lent reinvention, and do remember to keep your journal so that you will have memories of this significant time to look back on in the future. And if you achieve more during Lent than you’d ever hoped or dreamed, then why not celebrate with a special photography experience at your nearest Venture Studios?

Check back here soon for more photography tips from Venture Studios: here to help you create #memoriesforever.