Having Patience in photography
Something that has always amazed me in photography is just how long it takes to reach a point where you feel you can finally master something. They say it takes 10,000 hours to become a real master. Doesn't matter what it is to truly harness all of your abilities you need to put in the hours and start getting a lot of your bad or misplaced work behind you.
I have been shooting now for 10 years and if you were to look at my first work you would see photography that is strikingly different from what I produce today. I don't even think I was using a RAW developer for much of my first year of shooting. Come to think of it I didn't even know what RAW was, I just knew that people who shot it were leaps and bounds better than I was and I wanted to be on their level.
However, I was not someone who wanted to wait, put in the work and sift through years of failure to get what I wanted. Yes, I was going to be the first photographer who was the best at everything he did within just a few photoshoots. I was so focused on being the best and being so perfect that a lot of my early work suffered because of it. I would not go out because I would feel so badly about the horrible photos or the simple mistakes I was making. I was the worst critic I have ever had in my life.
This was a double-edged sword for me though. See I later learned that I was different in how I saw myself and my work. I was not someone who simply wanted to take a good photo. No, I was someone who wanted to take the best photo and anything short of that was an utter embarrassment. This lead me to really put in a tremendous amount of effort. As they say "rough seas make for better sailors" and I was someone who had been swallowed in a maelstrom. This continued for almost 8 years before I would finally seek help for my anxiety and depression that I was in.
This really turned a new page in my life, suddenly I was realizing that because of my perseverance to work through all that pain I had inadvertently shown myself the beauty of patience. Sure I was a wreck and hated everything that I put out there up until that point, but my will not to give up and give in really did make me a better artist and better photographer. I see so many people out there struggling through what I did and giving up. They quit and say the market is too saturated, that everyone is a photographer and that they will never be able to make art like this person or that person.
All of this is completely untrue as this is the price you must pay to become a master at something. This is patience hitting you right in the face and saying get up and try again. I know this is getting a little rambly so I will wrap it up here but the overarching point I want you to take away from this is that to truly make meaningful work you need to fight through disappointment, time and time and time again. You will not become a master overnight, hell you won't become one in a few years. But you need to understand that it's okay to fail, to make terrible work that never sees the light of day and to rip up prints that don't turn out right. This is the process that we all must go through and having your ego stroked by family and friends is not the way to become good at something.
If you are struggling, fighting and feeling down about your artwork I say good. Keep going. Cry it out, punch a wall, ruin something expensive, whatever you need to do to get it out of the way so you can get back to trying again. Fail more, fail often, fail better. Your future self will thank you for going through hell inch by inch to become the artist you have always wanted to be.
