This is a wonderful time! This is a wonderful time to be a photographer! The digital age, with its cameras, Photoshop, Lightroom, plugins, widgets, websites, apps, wordpress, blogs, FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, has allowed us to connect and share faster, with greater accuracy, and with a broader reach than ever before. Lest we take it for granted it would do us some good to remember that this is a wonderful time for photography.
This is also a challenging time. There is so much available to us so quickly that we can be at risk for developing an inability to tolerate disappointment, boredom, or frustration. This ability to tolerate uncomfortable mood states is an important skill that we begin to learn early in life provided we have some good mentoring through attuned caregivers. Parents will recognize this as the tantrum throwing ages of 2 or 3 when each little disappointment becomes a major crisis for a while. Eventually we learn that small disappointments are different from large ones and, hopefully, we stop “losing it” every time something does not go our way.
The challenge, however, is to continue learning this skill in smaller and more subtle ways as we continue our journey through life. Our current “distraction available at every turn” world threatens us gently, time and again, with the reward of distraction from discomfort rather than encouraging the tolerance of it.
And this threatens our art.
That LCD on the back of the camera offers much distraction in the form of chimping or learning our internal camera settings that it just might detract us from developing the patience to watch the light slowly change over a landscape. The computer, that wonderful device that has opened this whole new world, threatens to distract us through Twitter, FaceBook, Google+ing from sitting and focusing on our editing, book-making, working efforts. (I was made vibrantly aware of this just the other evening…and as a result my latest Blurb.com book remains uncompleted.)
All hope is not lost however; we continue to have dominion over our own minds for the time being. Just becoming aware of our tendencies, and the tendencies of our continued connection to Web2.0, can do wonders in making mindful choices to focus on what will actually feed our soul, nurture our creativity, and produce the work that is precious to us and-I would argue-to the world.
How have you found yourself distracted from your goals, projects, or photography? Stay tuned for another blog post on some ideas how to overcome “distraction-itis.”