“Photograph what comes natural for YOU”. This thought has been rummaging through my mind for a few months now.  This sentence rang true once I started diving into the stress and fear I feel before an assignment or project.  My fear is worrying that I am not going to get the shot that someone else would if they were in my shoes.  Say if Tim Kemple, Corey Rich, or any other number of talented photographers were there, at the same place, with their vision.  It is me doubting my eyes, my mind, & my vision and because of this I cower and shoot at an angle I have seen someone photograph successfully already.  Nothing new, no progression, nothing standout.  It has been done.

This stress can be big enough that it can cause me to not enjoy an assignment or project and eventually photography as a whole.  In a previous post I talked about the freedom a camera should bring, this stress takes that freedom away.  So once again I started reflecting on times I have felt the most free with my camera and again it was those times that I was uninhibited by fear and pressure.  I was just photographing what I naturally saw at the moment.  So before a project, a wedding, an assignment, anything, know that you are getting paid to photograph what it is you uniquely see.  If you have mistakenly marketed yourself with photographs that are not natural and enjoyable for you to take then everything you will get paid to go and photograph will then be un-natural, not enjoyable and not as good as the photographer you are trying to mimic.

The challenge I have presented myself is to not stress beyond reason before a day of photography.  The way I calm myself is by remembering I am supposed to just shoot whatever it is I intrinsically see with my own eyes.  Any photographer who has done his reading about photography and making a living through it has already read about this truth and now I also claim this truth.  Shoot what it is that you see & enjoy.  You are doing yourself and everyone else a huge favor.