Mule Deer in Glacier Nat’l Park
I’m feeling a little discouraged. Altho my photos have been added to favorites and to some treasury lists, I feel I have not made a big enough impact. The images I have for sale on Etsy, although I think are good, have not inspired another to own or hang it on their wall. I browse around at other people’s work and they seem to have a specialization. A particular type or style of photographs that they exhibit.
Do I have a style? Doing an audit of the images on my site, I don’t feel that my style has been represented. A review of my photos in my own files, I see that I gravitate towards nature. But all the photos are more or less straight shooting. In other words they are pretty faithful representations of what I saw at the time.
My challenge, it seems, is to find that something that sets me apart. With the existence of such high quality cameras ( some of which do all the work for you), an image must be much more than a documentation of that fraction of time when it was taken. It must convey a feeling, mood or thought that strikes a cord with another.
Another challenge for me will be to control the anal side of me that wants to make a list, accomplish a specific thing or things on that list and then cross it off.
This list making side is mainly a result of working all day at my ‘day job’ and not being able to attend to things when I think of them. I have always been the kind of person who doesn’t know what I am doing that day until I’m doing it, but when it comes to this ‘side line’ of mine, I cannot be so flexible. I have felt I need to organize and prioritize to get the best use of my time. I have been spending my time getting more images added to my shop and less time on the art. It has been important to get the shop running, learn how to navigate, set policies and so forth, but as I get a better handle on that I will need to devote more time to producing an image that will not say to others “I could do that”. Balance, balance, balance.
That being said, I now need to concentrate on the art.
I was up early yesterday – 2:30 am – it was a sleepless night and I decided to make good use of it. First I attended to some housekeeping thinking that would put me back to sleep. But after that was taken care of, I was still wide awake. I opened a few photos that I had earmarked for possible addition to my shop and started tweaking. I ran into something that I think worked quite well on the few photos I was amending. I may have bumped into, for these couple of photos, that element that conveyed my feeling at the time. The beauty of this early morning session was that I did not feel my time was limited as I so often do when I am working in the evening. During a weekday evening I often feel a need to accomplish something, but that morning I had no specific agenda. My hope is that I have produced something that says a little more – a little more about how I perceived the image/scene.
In the future, as I segregate those photos worthy of more attention, I will take a few minutes to clarify what makes it special for me. What did I see, what inspired me and if I had (when taking the photo) seen only this or that. This, then will be my foundation for making a more unique image. An image, hopefully, that will inspire awe.
I need to give more leeway to the let IT happen and go with the flow stream of things.
PhotoDmore 