For what seems to have been a very long time (in actuality, about 2 years), I have felt like I’ve been waiting for my plans to fall into place. And by plans, I mean ideas. And at the end of this last year, 2011, I found myself still waiting.
The whole year, I wanted to press on with my wedding photography business. I wanted to get the ball rolling on building up a video production company with a fellow photographer friend. I wanted to hold teaching classes with other photographers and pick up my camera and start shooting more often.
And for all my wants and attempts at making those things happen, it seemed that some things just wouldn’t move along, or got scratched off completely. And the more I tried to get the ball rolling, the more hills that seemed to raise up in front of me. Which is often the case in life. But who am I to complain, really? It’s all due to, as the hipsters would say, “First world problems.” Anything I could possibly think of to bore someone’s ear off with me trying to explain why I’m not where I want to be in my life would just… well, it would bore the hell out of me too. Sometimes it was me waiting for things to be perfect, sometimes it was friends backing out of the plans, or sometimes it just wasn’t meant to be either way.
I think the biggest thing that prevented me from shooting more photos, taking more video, doing more with my websites or anything related to progress in my passion… was the fact that despite how easy-going and laid-back I am, when it comes to what I love, I tend to turn into quite the OCD anal-retentive freak. I want my work to be awesome. I want it to be undeniably good.
Perhaps because I’m colorblind, maybe I feel I have something to prove. But at the end of the day, there’s not much I can do about being colorblind. What I can do is make something as perfect as I can. And then what? It’ll be out there, it’ll be seen, and I can go off and start working on the next exciting thing.
But I’ve noticed that I tend to get so caught up in worrying if something is perfect, that I end up putting it on hold, for days, weeks, months! I still have wedding photos in my digital library from the beginning of last year that I’ve never posted! The clients have all received them, but I never posted them because, well, what if they weren’t good enough? Then what?
It turns out, I’d probably get a better reaction online in my social networks than what I’ve received so far – which was nothing. I hadn’t posted anything! And like Michael Jordan said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”
I have all these images on my computer, and in my many, many external hard drives. And so many have never seen the light of day, either from not being printed or not being posted online. All because I wanted them to be perfect before getting them out there. And as it turns out, so many of them have never been completed.
I used to shoot for the sake of shooting, just to feel the camera in my hands and know that I was saving a moment in time for myself, or for my clients, or for my friends. But for some reason*, I started having doubts about myself.
*And when I say ‘for some reason’, believe me when I say that all photographers go through that period – it’s only natural to be concerned if your best creative work is as good as you think it is, with no clear definition of whether or not it actually is to others until you get confirmation via the smile on peoples’ faces when they see your work.
But with that ‘period of doubt’, on top of taking a hiatus from photography, I feel like I lost sight of that little light at the end of the tunnel – the goal, the dream, whatever ‘it’ is or was. If you jump off that train, can you ever catch up to it? *sigh* I digress… but back to what I was saying, I started having the feeling that so much of my work was ‘in progress’ that I was being drowned by my past…
Either way, I am quite tired of waiting to be ‘caught up’. Perhaps I’ll get to the point of posting this last year’s work on this blog, perhaps not. But I know that this year, I am going to stop investing so much time into being ‘perfect’, and put more into being ‘productive’.
Because, at the end of the day, sometimes done is better than perfect.
