Do it for yourself, not for anyone else.
I would say I’m a creative person. Back in my younger years I would’ve been changing my blog layout almost monthly, if not weekly. I did many photomanipulations, with stocks from DeviantArt. I used a camera for some periods to capture the beauty I was seeing in things outside, but never went really through with it.
My father used to make a lot of photos with his camera, of us and our trips. Some years ago he spent months scanning all the negatives to a digital format and processed them into digital images. Some big archive with my childhood memories I still treasure today. They’ve got hardcopies in their house too, a bunch of albums.. But as I’m far away from them, this digital stuff is better for me.
We started traveling and bought a proper camera to document our travels some years back. I fell in love again with shooting photos, especially nature and abandoned areas reclaimed by nature. I started sharing on Flickr, but soon was overwhelmed with the quality of other photographers. I felt not good enough, and eventually I took down my account. At some point I discovered 500px, and started sharing my photos there, just the ones I hand picked to be published with my real name. Some sort of a portfolio.. And even there, at some point for my feeling the bar got raised too high and now I’m at the point I want to close my account again.
Coming here, rediscovering the small web, I got reminded of these scenarios. I wrote a lot over the years, mostly personal with a creative touch sometimes. I still feel proud of some writings. And there too, I went from anonymous, to publish under my real name on Medium.com when it just started. Soon, it would grow bigger.. More talented writers came. Again, my personal bar of what to publish raised too high.. and I took down my account once again.
I feel I’m at a similar impasse again, I open Lightroom, see the 5000+ photo collection I have to work through, and I’m being held back on working on any of them. Mostly afraid to fail, fail myself. Spending hours to polish up any photo, and it will still not be good enough to publish to my portfolio.. This has been going on for months, and it’s holding me back too much.
I even consider giving up completely on photography, and creative writing. Just use my creativity for my work, solving problems in a creative way with software engineering. I’m producing art for my feeling sometimes, some piece of code that works efficient and beautifully.
But I do miss producing anything visual, something that inspires anyone with a certain emotion. And one thing I’m learning by being here, is that I can create, publish and do it for myself. Not to gain any views, hearts, likes etc. Any of the statistics on the bigger platforms that make me feel my work is not worthy.
I’m not sure yet what to do next, but I’ll just throw this out there. If anyone is reading this, in a similar situation.. You’re not alone. Every big artist started somewhere small, just keep going at it, as long as you love doing what you’re doing, it’ll be great.
Do it for yourself, not for anyone else.