Never Look Over Your Shoulder

That shows fear. And don't look over the shoulder of anyone else - that's nosiness. But what can a photographer do, when everything bad that they have ever done is lurking behind them? And everything that someone else is doing looks good and is in front of them all day? Whence cometh tranquillity and whither doth it go? I promise not to use cometh or doth again - but I had to do it at some time in my writing career. It was either doth or death. Well, let's get back to gettin' back that photographic tranquillity. We may need it to force ourselves into the studio tomorrow morning or to the camera club on a Monday night. If we find ourselves feeling a little anxious on either score there are things we can reflect upon: a. Whatever we learned in basic photography, we learned from someone else - either through book learning or practical demonstration. If it was crude stuff, we were learners, and no apprentice's work is that of the master to start with. I can look through my negatives and find fingerprints on them taken in the 1960's...and be ashamed. I can be proud that the prints disappear after a short period of time. I can see dust spots and blown highlights and all sorts of digital errors in images taken in 2008. They disappear in 2010. b. Our work was derivative, because we were deriving it from our teaching sources. That's how learning works. And remember that our teachers did the same with earlier works. All the way back to Nièpce people were looking at what went before. Many of them, and many of us, have added something to it all. And copying and derivation and repetition is not all destructive - part of it is powering cultural development. c. Everyone has a good idea sometime. If they never show it to us we cannot see it - and it wasn't that good an idea. We've got a moral duty not to steal, but no such stricture exists on thinking. If we see something good - see above - we should not steal the image, but we can think about it and react to our own thoughts. A good friend, Leo Laden, once told me that if you have a idea that you think might work, get someone to share the task. If you have an idea that you know works, act on it yourself. PS: Apologies for not posting the Wednesday column until Thursday. Unexpected visitors.