Picture Story-1st Reflection

Lamott feels like she is speaking for me. She is speaking of all my personal experiences as a photographer. It is relieving to read somebody else talking about exact same experiences that I go through almost very day of my life. There are a lot of things that struck me in the first several chapters but the most compelling one for me is the one on perfectionism.

I have always take in as a good quality until this year. This year- I think as I am growing older towards the 30s-I started to realize how much it was hurting me as a photographer and an individual in general. As Lamott puts it, perfectionism is the biggest "obstacle" that one can put in front of herlelf/himself. It has created such a huge fear of failing in me that I have actually started either constantly failing or not trying at all, which is the worse than failing all the time. Perfectionism can be such an evil thing that paralyzes a person to the extent where she/he can't produce at all.

Also her idea of short assignments are greatly applicable to our field. Reading her lines actually encouraged me to assign myself two little assignments for this weekend. First one will be on our kitchen chairs. We have four old chairs at home around our awesome kitchen table. But almost every one of them are falling apart in the middle which causes a lot of back pain after sitting on them for extended hours during long sessions like now. So this weekend I would like to take a portrait photo of each one of these chairs at the same location and combine them in one frame and blog about it.

My second self assignment will be on the monster truck event this Saturday if I can fit it in my work schedule. I want to do a one day portrait project on the attendees of the event.

Tao of Photography was again a bit confusing for me. But there was one quote that I had to copy for myself:

“Don’t try to subdue a subject to your way of thinking- you can’t push a piano through a porthole. Go with the flow. Be flexible. Adapt. The scene will not adopt to you, as you will discover when viewing your pictures…. Don’t let your expectations project mirages that leave you thirsting. Release expectations. Defy assumptions. Unite with the scene to see not what you want to see, but what’s there. Then strengthen the strong points to build the photograph you want. Sometimes a situation will prove to be unphotogenic. Recognize when that happens and be on your merry way looking for something else.”

Derek Doeffinger - The Art of Seeing

I find this reminder quote so useful for starting photographers like us. I think, in the past, I had fallen into mistake of assumptions or projecting my ideas onto the subjects that I was photographing. I even used it a guideline that I created for Boone Life.