"Getting Back Into The Swing"

This week I’ve been working on finding journal articles for my research paper. Since my main topic is photography, which is pretty broad, I had to narrow my focus down to smaller subtopics to research, and then eventually write an entire paper.
The “narrowing down” was difficult for me, and I’m not very surprised by that since that’s what I usually have the hardest time with when it comes to doing research and writing papers. Not the actual writing part, more just getting my brain to focus, and then stay focused on a single topic, idea, or task. Eventually, I settled on basic techniques of photography as my topic of research, after reading about, and looking work of renowned photographers, like Ansel Adams, Robert Capa, Mario Testino and Art Wolfe. I had originally wanted to write my paper on different photographers, giving a brief background, then focusing on their personal inspirations towards their work. I quickly decided the information it was very clear cut enough to write a paper on. Instead, I found what all these photographers had in common: they all knew how to take amazing photos, and that brought me to the basics.
After choosing a particular topic, my next step was finding articles to write my four annotated bibliographies. I’d advise to anyone searching for journal articles to make sure they're using an easy to use, reliable database; I used JSTOR. I had done research on there for a history class last semester and liked the way it was set up. Also, while searching any database it's important to realize how the search engine works, JSTOR and GoogleScholor search results are generated by keyword, so if you search for, say “the history of photographs” your search results will include every source in the database with the words “the” “history” “of” and “photographs.” So you’ll end up with hundreds of thousands of articles, and a good 99% of them might not have anything to do with what you're actually looking for. With that being said, always search being as specific as possible, it’ll save you from reading through lists of promising sounding articles, which have zero relevance to what you're looking for. After finding articles came the annotated bibliographies. They’re super useful because once you summarize all the important stuff, you don’t have to go back to the article once actually writing your paper. Additionally, I find it easier to recall/retain information when it's written in my words, vs. when it's in another person's words. I guess I wouldn’t consider annybibby’s a waste of time, but they're tremendously tedious, to say the least. My most productive day in the mists of all if this was Monday, I knew what I had to get done by Friday and was trying to be proactive in getting it all done. I’d have to say my least productive day was Wednesday, for no other reason than that I was distracted, and just didn't get anything that had to be done done.