my personal reminders

Today I’d like to share a few thoughts on the psychology/mindset of photography. And this can apply to the creative side in general, whether you’re an artist, painter, drawer, whatever.

When it comes to creativity, it’s easy to get distracted and disillusioned along the way. The creative road of mastery is long. Extremely long. And it requires, work, focus, and mental strength (sometimes more than talent itself) to keep going.

So this article serves as just a small reminder for those who feel like the road ahead is very very long - or a reminder to those more experienced who may have forgotten how far they have traveled.

In photography/creativity/whatever, one big reminder I give myself is: at the end of the day, “keep taking photos, even if you suck”.

This is advice I continue to give to myself, even as I improve in the craft. It sounds simple and trite, but it’s truly effective since it focuses on what I like to think of as the only actions that truly matter. Lets get into it.

There’s a LOT of Noise

In the modern era, there’s an endless source of noise and information. We have youtube, the internet, forums, etc, where there’s simply an endless amount of information. While this can be great in terms of granting us access to knowledge and advice, it can also cloud our minds with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t matter.

Everyone’s going to be telling you this or that - and there’s going to be a ton of conflicting information (yes this blog is included in the noise). Because of this, there will be many “shoulds”, “need tos”, and “have to dos”.

We are constantly pulled (whether we realize it or not) in multiple directions by all of this conflicting info that is trying to tell us how to live our lives. And in this noise, it’s easy to get distracted away from the simple actions: just taking photos, doing the work, focusing of what matters.

It’s something I’m guilty of myself and try to remind myself as often as possible. So this may result in less screen time, or taking advice with a grain of salt, or spending more alone time. Whatever it may be - anything to remove distractions and focus on the one thing that matters most - the art and creativity.

This is something many people don’t understand. Yes it’s important to learn, but we learn the most by doing. And if we can drive our attention and focus to the actions (and not the information floating around the actions) then we can spend more time “doing” and less time thinking about what we ought to be doing. For it’s our everyday actions that will truly shortcut us to mastery and success.

In photography, that simply means taking thousands and thousands of images. Not silly or useless snaps. But intentional photos focused on learning or trying different things.

The Road is Long - Don’t Keep Track or You Will Run Out of Time

The creative side or mastery of any sort is an endless road.

We know it’s long, but it’s probably way longer than you imagine it to be. There are artists who’ve worked their entire lifetime and still feel like trash. Therefore, it’s important to extend our time horizons to more than months and years, but even a decade (or multiple decades).

So while I say “the road is long”, I mean to imply: there’s no need to get impatient or speed your way through these things. It’s a lifelong process of learning. Of course you want to be good now. But it takes time. And if you try and keep count, you’re going to run out of time.

So obviously as I mentioned before, you need thousands and thousands of pictures, but don’t keep track of how many you’ve taken. That will cause you to focus on the number rather than the craft. What I mean to say is to imply how long it’ll take - and to not focus on the time we’ve spent doing something but on the actions and art itself.

Photography/Creativity is a Numbers Game

If you take a thousand photos you’re bound to end up with one or two good ones.

Then you can learn from that and implement it into the next set of a thousand photos. This is how you get “good”.

If you do this long enough you’ll end up with a tons of good photos and your hit rate is going to increase.

This is important since if we’re focused on the idea that “we suck”, we’ll make ourselves feel bad for no reason. And there’s really no need to be doing so. We can instead focus more on: the aspects of improvement, what you like and what you don’t like, what they’re doing that you like and how you can integrate that into your own work, etc, etc.

And that’s pretty much it.

So although you may suck now, worrying about sucking does nothing to make you “better”. It’s useless emotion from your mind that likes to have you wallowing in self pity. Instead of worrying about how good you are, I find it much more useful to focus on how to get better.

Eventually this will allow you to reach a point where you no longer suck, but are actually good.