Confidence is a strange thing.........

I mean one day it can be there in spades and the next...poof.....just gone, and you wonder what the heck you are doing.

Over the many years that I have trod this place we call earth, I have had those dips and peaks and now I am beginning to realise there is no one point in your life that you will not suffer a loss of confidence. BUT the thing to realise is it is NOT the time to let it sink you...NO....it is a time when you take time to stop and relax.

Take time out and ask yourself....."what is really going on here?'
For me it was the dreaded comparing myself to others, not a good thing to do in reality.
Its OK to be inspired by other people and their art and craft but when we compare ourselves, well we really are setting ourselves up for a confidence dip.
I have muddled along for years with a camera in my hand, loving the experience and snapping away with no real idea of what I was doing. Just trying to see things with an artists eye, framing images in my mind and seeing if I could somehow capture it.

I was given a new camera lens by my sweet husband and I wanted to take "great" photos, just like the wonderful images I see on the other blogs. I read how others apologised for their poor images, and I thought to myself, "What? These photos are lovely! If these are considered not up to scratch, what does that say about mine?"

Confidence drops and suddenly NOTHING is good enough anymore. How fragile my confidence!
I too apologised for the photos I put on the blog, until a sweet lady took the time to tell me...actually its OK, she liked them. (Thank you Joy) Confidence pricks its ears up.

So what I did was decide that I would do as I did back in the day when I didnt know what the heck it was I was actually doing, I would just get out there with no expectations and start taking photos again.

This is a little pier on the shore down the end of my street. It was not a glamorous place but the light was perfect and the bay as still as it could be. I clicked away, inspired and just loving what I was seeing in my mind. Yes its all been done before but I was doing this for ME.

As you can see I took a lot of the same thing, and this is something perhaps I had forgotten. We never get to see the hours of practice and bit of good fortune that is behind that art work we admire. Some of assume that those artists and bloggers out there just have the gift and we can only dream of being as good. Confidence my prickly friend, you can retreat and cower in a corner becasue it feels safe there or you can step out and realise that you are just as talented as anyone.

You can stand still and wait observing the beauty in everything, and not be afraid of the inner critic.

The light may fade but there is still beauty to behold.

Dont delete all your errors they teach you the most. The top one was with flash, the bottom one just by the light of the room in the evening.

I also cropped the bottom image to get a better composition. That was another thing I forgot to take into account when confidence was low. These days there are very very few images that are NOT photoshopped in ANY way. Photographers have always used lighting, poses, composition, darkroom techniques and now photoshop to enhance the original image.

I am still learning this fact, I am so trusting in so many ways it seems. Yes dear fellow low confidence photographers there are many tricks to getting the final image.

I cropped these shots, taking out any distracting areas and in the last one I saturated the colour to bring out the pink.

So when those confidence erasing gloomy clouds gather on the horizen, take it easy and be kind to yourself. You are talented and you can offer the world whatever it is you would like to share. 

It would be a dull forest indeed if only one bird was singing....even if it was at perfect pitch.......