One day I was walking on the street with C, I remembered it was in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, in front of a shop around the corner, we saw these big red sofas behind the window. C immediately suggested me to take a photo, (she does that quite often), so I did. Even though it took me some time to find the right angle, but I still felt that it might not be a good one.
A couple of days later, when I was organizing my photos, I found this photo and surprisingly, I really liked it.
After that, for a week or so, I started to feel that my confidence in photography was diminishing. Every time I was trying to take a photo, this photo will appear in my head, and ask me – Are you sure it’s a good idea? Can you really take a good photo without someone telling you what to shoot? It really was a struggle to me. And I didn’t realized until later, I actually thought it was all C’s fault. I blamed her for telling me to take the photo, I’d rather not take the photo instead of having a good one but it’s someone else’s idea.
Have you ever saw other photographer working in action? If you saw he/she taking a photo in a certain way, would you “steal” the idea and try to take the same photo? I surely wouldn’t. Because if I did, it feels like I cheated, and no matter how good the photo is, it’s not 100% my creation anymore, just like this photo with red sofa.
This sounds like a fair point, but later I realized that whether the idea is original or not, it’s not the problem. The real problem is my ego, which is too big and blind me from seeing the efforts I put behind this photo. Instead of considering this photo as a work of collaboration, I stubbornly look at it as some kind of obstacle or even, a failure. Don’t get me wrong, ego sometimes can be a good thing, to push one’s limit and create something extraordinary. But unfortunately in my case, my ego is actually damaging my confidence and jeopardizing my creativity.
It was not easy, but I still tried my best to tame my ego and put myself back together. After while, I started to be able to appreciate this photo and also be thankful to C who spot the scene in the first place. And that’s the story of this photo.
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