Day 174: Sneaky little thoughts creeping in

When it comes to the mind it is like weed suffocating your garden plants. Very slowly the weed is growing among the edible plants and you have to weed it out constantly before it is too late. It is a challenge to decide when the weed is still small enough not to endanger other plants and when it has grown so big that it is about time to get rid of it. The mind is in a similar way tempting us with constant small thoughts that looks very innocent and we can not measure and categorized them by their harmful impact because since are not physical. Often time it is only by the pain and illness that manifest as the consequence that we can see how damaging they actually are. And as has been explained, the existential process of amalgamation of the mind with the physical body is increasingly shortening the time between the accepted and allowed thoughts and the physical consequence.

Lately, I am being challenged especially by the consequence of the pain in my right knee and the pain in my lower back. The pain in the knee manifests very quickly, almost suddenly when and as my mind is producing specific unconscious thoughts. And the pain in my lower back has been a recurring manifestation after I take a quick nap in my bed during the day and I think about things that are worrying me while napping. Besides that, I am also experiencing like a sort of pressure or inflammation of some internal organ right below the right half of my rib cage. I am not sure if it the intestine or liver or something else. Occasionally I also feel slight pinching pain and some kind of liquid or gas movement there. I remember to have the same sort of feeling during middle school and doctors checked me with the ultrasound and found nothing unusual. So I am not sure if it is worth to spend time for the doctor's appointment and if they would again find nothing. Anyway, what I can at least do at this moment is to check my thoughts and face them and then I will see if any of these symptoms will change.

So what I am currently dealing with is the decision to restart my photography business after 10 years of not offering professional photography services anymore. I started my own graphic and web design business in 2000 and then completely focused only on photography from the year 2004 to 2008. After that, I sold all of my photography equipment and changed my photo studio into a counseling office. In the following years, I have also shot a lot of events however only for my personal use, with my mobile phone camera and for free. However, I did invest many hours into photos of each event to process them professionally with photo editing software composition and color-wise. That proves that photography has remained my passion but I did not earn anything by it. So I have spent a lot of my time for free instead of shooting photos for some clients and earning my living with it. Well, that was my decision since I worked on projects where I planned to earn a lot more by doing other things but sadly the promises of my financial compensation were not fulfilled by others.

Now, when I am returning to photography after a decade, I started to buy the basic gear so that I can start executing photo jobs. I managed to purchase a camera body, two zoom lenses, a flash, a stand, and some accessories which enable me to shoot many things. I had to refresh my photography knowledge and learn all the functions of the DSLR camera body. What I started to experience is the heaviness and bulkiness of the camera and lenses comparing to shooting with a smartphone. It is also a strain to look through a small optical viewfinder with just one eye. Although the professional camera body and lenses enable much more technical options for photography they are a much more demanding experience to work with. And if I add also the stand with the studio umbrella and external flash, combined with different backgrounds and data cable for tethered shooting via the notebook computer, it takes a lot more physical work to just prepare all the equipment for the shoot compared to taking snapshots with a smartphone.

Then there is a business aspect of photography. It takes around 2 to 3 years before others start to recognize your services and the orders are becoming more frequent. So I will have to spend a lot of time and money just to share the word about myself to the surrounding inhabitants. I already made the first move by designing and sending to print 3.000 pieces of business cards and have ordered 50 clear plastic business card stands that I plant to distribute among hairdressers, florists, sweet shops, makeup artists, restaurants, hotels and wedding planners in my local area. And I started to redesign my website with the sample photos of my previous projects. What I found is that I am looking with different eyes on the photos than when I shot them a decade ago so it is hard for me to decide which photos to include. Because I now have an improved artistic taste and plan to create much better photographs than before. Of course, I will, in the beginning, be limited with a lower quality of the gear compared to what I already had before, so I plan to invest most of my initial earnings into better lenses.

15 years ago when I had the need to enhance my photography skills there were very little options to acquire additional knowledge. In our country, I was able to find a secondary school for design and photography which would mean me having to physically attend classes in our capital city for 3 years. However, I was lucky to then discover a distant class of professional photography at the New York Institute of Photography. It offered me more flexibility so I picked it and was able to finish it within one year with great success. But now I am being offered new photography courses via Facebook ads on a daily basis by many online learning platforms, famous professional photographers and also there have many new physical photography schools emerged in our country. And there are so much free YouTube tutorials available where photographers are sharing their biggest professional secrets. It looks like now some photographers are earning more from sharing and teaching that from selling their photography services.

Sharing videos from behind the scenes of photoshoots is something that a lot of photographers do now. This has become a new way of advertising in order to increase the number of followers and potential clients. It is cool that we are entering an era of transparency where more and more things are being exposed. And the new type of a profession that is emerging is actually called the influencer. So many clients are not looking for someone that is the best professional at a certain job but how large their group of followers is and how great exposure they would get if hiring this influencer to do a job for them. Basically, it is the attention that has become a very sought-after product. In this era of social media with a constantly increasing quantity of information and shortened attention span, people are craving for attention. So within all these new trends of how marketing is being done lately, I am now facing a challenge of how to position myself and my professional services. And especially in what way to be different from others in order to create a competitive advantage that would result in me getting hired and being paid for my services.

In photography, we are seeing great technological changes. The biggest one is, of course, smartphone cameras becoming more and more powerful and capable. Almost everyone is on a daily basis producing photos and sharing them via their social networks. And also there are online photo banks where professionals are uploading their work for sale. The number of snapshots and photography artworks is growing exponentially and the generation of millennials is entering the workforce market with new approaches. Whoever wants to stay in business has to adapt and reinvent themselves in order not to become outdated. I have seen even the artificial intelligence software that creates photos from scratch in a matter of seconds by only giving it the input of what the elements the photo needs to be composed of. In all fields of profession, technology is taking over more and more jobs so society will have to change the support and distribution system in order to provide for the people who are not capable to adapt to effects of technological progress effectively. Regarding all these observations I will now align myself in order to remain grounded and stable enough for me to exist in this fast-changing global situation:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to compare myself to a new generation of millennials and feeling old and outdated. I realize that while younger generations are contributing with their new ways of communication older generations will always be able to contribute with their accumulated experiences and wisdom. I commit myself to when and as my mind is producing thought like: “You are like a dinosaur and there is no use for you anymore in this world.” to stop and breathe. I commit myself to look at my strengths and find out the best ways of how I can be a useful part of this society within all the challenges that humanity is currently facing. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give up on myself and losing motivation to basically do anything and believing that there is no point in doing something. I realize that such an attitude is based on my previous desires of wanting to be more than others and then dropping this motivation which places me into a position where I need to redefine myself and discover what I would like to do in my life as pure self-expression without any kind of need and desire to be recognized and accepted by others. Within this, I commit myself to look deeper into myself in order to discover what I would like to express and than use this as the base for my self-movement and professional activities. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel inadequate due to past experiences with my very demanding father that constantly criticized my work no matter how hard I tried. I realize that his criticism has been a projection of his own feeling of inadequacy due to his past experiences and that I need to break the chain of transferring this pattern from generation to generation. I commit myself to when and as my mind produces thoughts like: “Why even bother to try since what you will do will be no good to anyone.” to stop and breathe. I then do the job the best I can by my own inner measure of quality and understand that whatever others will say about it that will be mostly a reflection of their own mindset and their own relationship towards themselve. 

Supportive free online course and audios in regards to this post:

DIP Lite Course
Using Criticism to Your Advantage
Taking Feedback Personally
You Define Me
Bringing Creation into Reality