On taking a step back with your craft

Have you gotten excited about the “awesome photos” you will take with your dSLR camera only to experience heartbreak when the images on the screen dissapoint your expectations?

Try these tips and see if your attitude doesn’t change for the merrier:

1. Be patient with yourself. Photography can become a delightful hobby or your new career, even. Good things take take and there’s so much to learn in working with light that you mustn’t feel yourself a failure if your photos are not “perfect” technically, aesthetically or self-critically speaking.

2. Take a step back. Literally. Sometimes moving around and snapping the shutter constantly can prove useful if you’re looking to experiment and finding the photos that fit with your style of choice.

3. Invent! Just when you think “there’s nothing new under the sun,” someone develops the latest and greatest and most innovative of their art. So get creative and decide what part of photography you’d like to call your art. You could be the next underwater-basket-weaver-portrait-capturing photographer.

4. Love you work. Ever heard that “You are your won worst critic?” I have. And I have to constantly work to appreciate my work for what it is: mediocre, boring, lousy, incredible, plain, fantastic, etc. It’s important to work as hard as you can to appreciate your own work. How do you expect anyone to love your work if you, first, do not. I’ll put my money on the fact that I would love your work, I’d just rather spend my time convincing you to begin  by appreciating your own.

It’s true that life’s busy pace and endless to-do lists carry us away. They can, at least, if we let them.

Being the fairly unwise and life-inexperienced 26-year-old that I am, I thought it appropriate to share a few ideas for how to “take a step back” and enjoy simple life pleasures. This photo, for instance, was one in 1,500 shots I snapped on Memorial Day weekend. And I cooled the hues as well as adjusting the fill-light. No fancy shmancy edits and it is not the original censored image. So there, you can fuss at me for not being spectacular and developing this from a 35 mm but I want you to find confidence in your own work if it takes comparison with mine.

Take it or leave it: amateur advice from yours truly.

Thanks for stopping by,