Getting Out of Your Own Way

We’ve all been there. Out making photographs with friends, things are going so well. You’ve lined up your composition, the light is perfect, and just at the right moment…there’s a head in your frame! Who the heck? “Frank! Get out of my shot!”

I’m not going to lie; I’m that guy. I don’t mean to be, and I’m sorry. What can I say? I get distracted. Sorry about that. Sometimes it feels like half my life I’m in someone’s way. And the other half? I’ve had a knack for getting in my own way as a photographer.

After 35 years behind many, many cameras, I’ve finally made peace with the fact that I am the bottleneck in my growth as a craftsman and an artist.

Viewed by my ego, that particular reality could be a great reason to start drinking gin from the cat bowl, but flip it around and it’s good news. If I’m doing something that gets in my way, I can also stop doing that thing and clear a path. Craft and art are challenging enough for most of us. So if I can make it a little easier on myself—and help you to do the same—I’d like to do that.

Here then are three ways in which I tend to get in my own way and, if what I see through the window of social media is any indication, there are many of us out there getting hung up and frustrated by the same things.

Because of the far and fast reach of the internet, we have an ability to share our work almost as soon as it is made, and to share it with a larger audience than ever before. Furthermore, that audience has the ability to issue feedback immediately: in fact, it’s encouraged. Like it. Comment on it. Up-vote it. Or otherwise. And the danger is that we know what others think of our work (less a full thought, really, and more a knee-jerk reaction) before we’ve lived with it long enough to really know what we think of that work ourselves.

Other voices easily drown out our own before we can really hear it. And this applies whether you hear positive or negative reactions; both are dangerous to us. Positive feedback too soon will stop us moving forward or going deeper. It’ll stop us at the low-hanging fruit and the first, most obvious iterations, and our work won’t have a chance at getting honed.  And negative reactions or feedback can stop us just as quickly when that feedback often only means “this work isn’t for me” and has nothing to do with how authentic or good it might actually be.

Please, please, remember that the most important voices are first your own and then qualified people you have specifically asked for feedback and from whom you can have a more nuanced conversation about your work, your methods, your motives, and not just the easy, no-risk Likes that people give online.