The time has finally come. Leading up to this moment, you’ve been sitting for hours in the hot sun, waiting for the bird’s toes to glide across the water, creating mesmerizing concentric circles, and boom: you got it!
Or perhaps you’ve set up a professionally crafted four-beam lighting system and, after repeatedly throwing the kombucha left and right, you’ve completed your splash (then mopping all night) . Maybe you’ve been working for weeks on a mood board, capturing the latest fashion trends, collaborating with other vendors, and using your new optics you’ve created a fashion photo brilliant. You’ve edited it in Lightroom, then Photoshop, and now it’s finally time: you can share your masterpiece with the world. And after that…
“I forgot my hashtag? No, they are there.”
Meanwhile, a video showing an 18-year-old man doing biceps curls received 763rd likes and 26th comments.
You wait until the next day and check your details.
“It only shows it to 374 of my 7k followers?!”
As a photographer, it’s easy to get frustrated, especially if you’re the type of photographer who doesn’t get caught up in the reels, social media trends, or video of you sipping a latte and make a choreographed song and dance to the latest popular audio .
If you are one of those photographers hope that people will love and stick with your work as it demonstrates a high level of skill, patience, ingenuity and breaking the standards of “seven elements of art,” you can often feel frustrated. You can feel like no one cares about your great photos and they just want you to rock your studio with the latest audio trends.
There are a number of possible reasons why you might feel depressed as a photographer. One of them is dealing with customers who are always trying to negotiate for the lowest possible price while asking you to do the most. Constantly underestimating your work can leave you feeling frustrated and unmotivated. Another cause of frustration for photographers is submitting their landscape photos to magazines, but receiving no response at all. While rejection can be difficult, being completely ignored can be even more frustrating. With all these challenges, it’s no wonder photographers feel like giving up.
But here’s why you don’t give up: because you’re an artist. You continue to make art because you are an artist. You don’t make art because they give you a 3 cm pixel heart on a mobile phone. You make art because you are art – an art maker. You don’t make art because you want people to stroke your ego; You make art because you have something in you that you want to express in pictures. You don’t make art because people appreciate art. You make art because you have ideas, curiosities, and visual discoveries within you that need to be revealed. You make art because it makes you happy doing art. Stage. You make art for the sake of making art. The way to not give up when making art is to remember why you are making art.
We can fall into depression when we lose sight of why. The important thing is that when fighting defeat, go back to the original version of yourself. The person who made you a creator. The one that existed before you started building your website, creating a YouTube channel, submitting your work to publications and posting it on Instagram. Come back to the creative enthusiast for the joy of showing off your unique interpretation of whatever’s behind your lens. Try to separate yourself from everything else that has to do with your work as a photographer and return to the love of expressing your unique vision.
Let me leave you this ending quote. I’ve shared it before, but it’s very relevant in this case. It’s Michelle’s remix of an Andy Warhol quote and it’s kept me from giving up in the illiterate Insta art world:
Make art, and while people are deciding if they like it or not, make more art.
I wish everyone a week of making art: for the joy, purpose and ultimate purpose of making art.
In the banner, from left to right:
@ludmillo_pierre, @beautymarkdebbie, @epicactionimagery, @lightnlense, @germainephoto, @afcasallas35, @sflphoto_com, Pete Coco.
