The Fight for Expression

Too much anxiousness is involved while sharing images online. Once it's uploaded, it's out there, and so are you. Your humble ego hangs in the balance on how it is received, and you double check your notifications to see the likes, hitting you like little explosions of dopamine. 

My experience is the same. I am my harshest critic. I rip my own images up in shreds if they don't satisfy me, and they get left on the cutting room floor.

a way to fall in love with your own work.

The stress of having each image I put out there highly polished and retouched to the best industry standards of photography hampers my growth as a photographer and stifles my creativity. I can't put anything out there without scrutinizing the living shit out of each image. Only if I am thoroughly satisfied that it will pass the criticisms of me,my peers and my audience will I hit the share button.

I would like to let go of that strict marketing practice for a little while, and just share images that I like, and not fret that they are not perfect compositions, airbrushed to death, gone through lightroom, then photoshopped with layers and flattened and resized and resharpened -Tweaking,teasing and manipulating it's way on to screens.

Isaac Asimov was quite against the pursuit of perfectionism. Trying to get everything right the first time, he says, is a big mistake. We need to lower our standards so we can enjoy the things we do. Constant curation of the instagram feed, the insta stories, and the snapchat shenanigans leads to less quality sharing in the end.

To let go of that pressure, the accepted norms of what is considered perfect,in my view is a way to fall in love with your own work. By standing by it, sharing it,discussing it, enjoying the life of what you have captured,I think those images will find a way to inspire you,inform you, educate you,evolve you and help you just be good.

Images get left behind when you get shy about sharing them.