Guilty Pleasures

Fear of failure is our greatest hindrance. This sort of fear paralyzed a lot of my younger life. As artists it seems it’s very difficult to get our creative lives started. In the beginning we haven’t yet developed skills to gain confidence. To choose a creative passion to follow also requires resources to acquire the tools of the trade. For me, when I first began photography, I bought a very cheap camera, the best I could afford. It suited me well through that learning phase. It took me a long time to finally acquire a good camera and my photography dramatically improved. My equipment grew as I could afford it piece by piece and it takes a long time to get much of that equipment. I spent a great many years shooting a lot of images, much of it failures. Constantly shooting every day. A roll or two of film was like my pack or two of cigarettes each day. I certainly couldn’t afford both so I chose not to smoke. I had to have them. I always doubted that what I was doing was ever good enough to show but I gained a guilty pleasure from the process. In the beginning it was like an addiction. I would process everything, but actually print very little. Filing was a constant hurtle. Film had to be protected and stored. I now have cases and cases of possibly thousands of rolls of film in storage. I am now thinking it would be nice to digitize or scan them all, but neither have neither the time nor the money to hire someone else to get it done. I do remember a lot of bad photos. Rolls and rolls of mistakes I chalked up to experience. I often wonder if your career takes off, if any of that will be of value so you just hold on to it. But it is a process that is long gone by the wayside so I am not sure there is much value holding on to all of it. The computer has made life so much easier to sort and archive. I just ordered a 3TB memory to add to the 4th compartment of my computer because my back up and files have grown so large. I do try to clean files out constantly and find editing is my greatest ally. But every once in a while I go back and find rare gems that would have been discarded because I was in a different frame of mind and my perception of what I was trying to create was different. But every image becomes a step to the next, as the process of growth is constant. Often times I will use the same set up in my studio to shoot many different people, exploring a new aspect of it with each subject. They all seem different. Photography is like a compulsion I just can’t seem to stop.

VIEW FULL IMAGE: Corey #505