In life, sometimes small obstructions add up and frustrate our drive. Rather than letting these little creative roadblocks stymie us, we need to find ways to move past them in small steps, without wasting too much effort.
Photography: how it’s going
Yesterday, almost didn’t take any pictures. I have been frustrated with my images lately. When we feel a strong sense of urgency about improving, then it is easy to start to evaluate our work too harshly. I do. Sometimes even while I am doing it. That can squelch creativity, as the mind’s eye is too preoccupied and turned inward for the physical eyes to see what is around them.
We want to make the very best that we can. I want every photograph to be flawless and compelling, to move people toward getting outside, to speak to that part of a person’s soul that allows the beauty of the natural world regenerate them.
Priorities and Perfectionism
Making images is a near compulsion, and making better and better images is the best way to be able to continue. When the dials are set wrong, when perfectionism gets turned up, when early mornings start to wear me down, when nothing seems good, and no scene shows promise, when the weather seems to be wrong no matter what the weather is, when all subjects seem boring, I write. I write to restore my vision, my purpose, and to think about tactics.
Vision and small steps
Yesterday, I actually pulled out a notebook and wrote on a couple of pages. That’s all it took to remind myself that growth does not happen in one huge jump or one long sprint. It goes in fits and starts, steep climbs and plateaus, and around Northeast Ohio, on firm paths and slick, muddy paths.
I remembered how when I started this under two years ago, I did that by defining success simply. I said that just taking a few images per day was success. They didn’t even have to be good. I decided that I would make sure I sent out one image, but I didn’t care if it was good. Success was just taking and sending at least one photoraph.
And it worked. Pretty soon, I had started blowing up the phones of family and friends, and it was time to find a better platform. I started taking and posting.
This is how I have worked almost every day with the exception of a few weeks in late winter or very early spring when I just haven’t found a subject, genre, or location that is quite that reliable. By then I need a break anyway.
Pressure of frenetic and vibrant spring
But as spring is in full flower, the pressure is now on again. And I am waking up with the birds. Okay, maybe just after. But I’m hiking in the dark, and watching the sun rise, and trying to find ways to tell the story of repeated quiet mornings. River under stars. Dawn sunbeams piercing a woodland mist. The little things that are moving and growing and carrying on the simple business that makes the fractal beauty we see.
Small steps toward creative goals and challenges
The challenge is to show what it is like. And that takes conditions better than those necessary to enjoy nature. When the gnats are swarming, when it feels like everything keeps going wrong: the wind blows away the dew and blurs the trees, the rain has covered everything with black flecks of detritus, it is necessary to have an appropriately sized definition of success.
Just take an image.
That first opening of the camera to light makes way for others. And soon there is something that works. Sometimes the obstructions are the subject or part of the scene.
Keep up with me and see how it’s going.
In roughly that order.