On new beginnings and confidence

Remember in my last post I mentioned that I was working on something that would take our photography ambition to the next level? Well, I’ve finally finished working on a portfolio of work that represents the boo and I, and I am so so excited to share it with everyone! I have this good ol’ warm feeling in my tummy from finally being able to say that I have a portfolio of work, and that what I want to do is actually going somewhere.

The setting up of this portfolio was tiring, both mentally and physically. It was tiring physically because I’m such an amateur at coding that I looked high and low for the best host for our website before finally settling on Squarespace (one thing I really like about Squarespace is their responsive and clean templates, which are highly customisable). Squarespace sometimes gets buggy and when something went wrong, I had to fix it and test it and fix it again to make sure the issue was ironed out. Then came the problem of a .com (we couldn’t afford to pay a year’s worth of subscription fee to Squarespace) but thank god Jovi came to the rescue and we got our .com just in time. It was tiring especially because of the crisis in confidence that I had whilst setting it up.

As research, I tasked myself to look through other photographer’s (side note: I still have trouble referring to myself or seeing myself as a photographer, because I constantly feel that I’m not good enough yet to consider myself as one) portfolios, to see how they categorized their photos, how the organized and lay them out, as well as little ideas I could adapt into our own site. I’ve always had an issue with insecurity and the more I looked at photographer’s portfolios, the more I became convinced that my work was nowhere as good as theirs, and what the hell was I doing, trying to set up a portfolio when I had barely anything GOOD or SUBSTANTIAL to show for myself.
As such, I spent many hours on a vicious cycle of taking down photos and putting photos up, convinced that my set showed no cohesiveness (that’s probably still true though) and that there was nothing worth looking at at all. I would constantly ask the boo, what do you think of our stuff? Do you think its ok? It was horrible, all these thoughts would be circling inside my mind, the insecurity and worry that we were overreaching ourselves, and that would eat away at me and question my capabilities.

I now realise that that sort of thinking was dangerous, that those were the sort of thoughts that broke a person and broke a person’s dreams and ambitions; leading to them giving up on something that they really loved and that they really wanted to spend the rest of their lives doing. As Jovi puts it very well, creators syndrome is harmful because it always makes us think that we’re not good enough. I remembered reading snippets from photographer interviews, that it was important to have confidence in the work that you create, and never sell yourself short. That it was important to take pictures for yourself and not for anyone else. And that photography is an art form, and is subjective in that a photo shows how the person behind the camera interpreted the scene, and it shows their aesthetics. There is no right and wrong answer in photography.  
I don’t think I would ever stop having little confidence attacks (I’m was a very very insecure person growing up) but I now learn that I should stop comparing myself to other people, and start doing what I feel is right, and shoot for myself so that my natural style and my personality shows through in all my work.

This post marks a transition from this blog to my new one: www.wilsonsharon.com/blog. I will no longer be posting on this blog, but will keep it open for posterity’s sake (and because I’m getting a lot of traffic for my restaurant posts :p).

I do hope that if you’ve been following my blog all this while that you will come by once in a while at my new space and continue to follow me in my journey of reaching my dream.

Click through for our new portfolio.