Maine 2005: Photos for Mom

Okay... I didn't take these today (but I sure wish I had! Work was not nearly as fun!). These are pictures I took on my family's trip to Maine in August of 2005. My mom asked me if I could find some of my best photos from that trip and show them to her, because she wants to print some for her living room summer decor. I am totally flattered, too! She could have bought some stock photos of lighthouses or some paintings at the starving artist sale or something, but she wants to frame and hang her daughter's creations. :) Anyway, I originally just put these on my blog because that was the easiest way to share them with her long-distance. However, looking through these photos reminded me of something I have started to lose lately, which is the excitement of making photographs for the pure joy of being an artist and finding beauty in the things around me. Ever since I set my sights on being a professional photographer someday, I have let myself become stressed over the challenges of learning all the technical stuff--camera functions, lighting, composition that follows certain principles--and I realized that all of that had created this gigantic creative block. Every time I do a walk for a photoshoot, I can't see anything creatively. Sometimes I'm even afraid to push the shutter button for fear of taking a bad photo. I'm still even quite shy about sharing my photography sometimes.

When I was taking these pictures in Maine, I had nothing but my Kodak point & shoot. It's easy to see in these photos that I was looking for ways to be creative and see things from different perspectives, and I wasn't hindered by anything but the size of my memory card. All of these photos resulted purely from the joy I found in the experience of making them.

As someone who is still wading through information, learning what questions to ask and what the answers mean, and fully immersed in the learning process, I find it all too easy to get bogged down by the things I don't know and lose my sense of wonder and creativity... letting my excitement and enjoyment of photography slip away, which is exactly the opposite of why I started doing this in the first place. So now I'm refocusing my efforts in the creative process and letting the learning process develop on its own. I've got a few photoshoots this month, which are all mostly for my benefit, so there's no reason I should not have fun!

All this to say, it's important to remember that you're doing what you want to because you love it! The knowledge will come (albeit, with lots of work), but don't let it get in the way of your creativity, because then why are you still doing this, and do you really love it?

Thanks for the reminder, Mom. :)

By the way, these photos are from Monhegan Island, Pemaquid Point, and Boothbay Harbor.