Ever since 'the invention' of blogging, I always had a fanciful idea of being 'a blogger'. But the idea was much more appealing than the actual task. But here I am in the early part of 2016, reviewing what were my creative and business achievements in 2015 and where I want to go during this year. So....
I am not sure if anyone is going to be reading this, but I decided to write about my journey, successes and weaknesses of being a creative and how it affects me and my life. Who knows perhaps I am about to stumble upon a revelation in blogging, to be able to voice and share my creative brain. I have been doing photography for many, many years. When I talk about how I feel about photographing I definitely talk with a lot of passion. I also tell those close to me that photography is also sometimes like my achilles heel, much like milk chocolate is too!
I look at everything, every day, all the time in terms of composition. When I am on the phone with someone and I look around or through the window, or if I am in a location, as I talk I am continually composing things I see. Sometimes I have to move around to compose better even though I am talking about something else, I am focusing on the conversation but my brain is in creative composition mode. Yesterday I went for breakfast with friends to a new place and all I could see was all the possible images around me, the feeling of inspiration was so immense and I love it, its the best feeling, to be inspired. Remember the e-card that said a creative persons brain is like a web browser with 2879 pages open at the same time, well I would say that is exactly how it is. My personal creative frustration everyday is one of having so many ideas and not enough time to execute them all because I have menial tasks that must take precedence like tax returns and just other general shit that quite frankly according to my creative brain, just stifles my time and prevents me from just losing myself in my work.
In 2013 I took on the task of food photography and for a whole slew of reasons I had a year where I just let everything else go and all I focused on was food prep, food props, food styling and then shooting, all to build a body of food work. One year later and 40,000 clicks and I was pretty proud of what I had achieved. When I shoot I put every grain of passion that I have into it. I feel it as a full body experience, I absolutely know when I have nailed a shot that I want. You don't need all the best and fanciest equipment you just need a vision and the absolute determination to produce what your vision is. Occasionally when I work on personal projects and the result works so well I almost feel tearful. Trust me here, I am not a pretentious artist getting all emotional, I think its just that somehow I cannot believe that what I created worked out so well. Am I alone in feeling this way? Because the opposite is also true, I can feel extremely deflated when something does not work, however one thing about me, I will just try again because invariably I have to know why that shoot did not work. If I did not possess this sort of determination I wouldn't have a single food image on this site because at the beginning, my first food images sucked big time. Seriously, I thought after all the years of event and portrait photography, surely food would be a walk in the park. Well for me it was a rude awakening. But I persevered nevertheless.
But sometimes things can work out strange in a creative world. In 1997 I had an exhibition in central London of my music industry work. I had to hang 40 images. I only had 38 that I believed in as a collection. At the beginning of my career back in England I will always remember a statement from my first boss who said, 'always make sure your worst is your best because people will always remember your worst'. But I needed two more images and so reluctantly I chose two images that 'I felt' were not up to par. Opening night of my show and I am sweating thinking who is going to notice those weaker images and remember them? A journalist comes to speak to me and points at one of those 'weak' images and I am about to launch into some bullshit about why I included it in the show when he expresses how magnificent it is. I swear I almost peed my pants. HA!. Moral of this story, that image to date is one I have sold the most copies of. As the creative I am I have come to realize sometimes what I see is not what others see. Who knows how many other great images I might have stashed away that I personally don't think are good enough. One day, when I have no menial tasks and a fancy scanner drops out of the sky and lands on my desk, I might get around to scanning a bunch of negatives and discover something quite good.
So this is where I come to the part where I hope my blogging life may begin in this magnificent 2016 year. As a photographer, I strive to grow, change, evolve and diversify with my captures hoping they all contain my unique signature style. I aim to do my best and then do better but overall if there is one thing I can say to any creative out there that I have learned, is that as you grow, the one key ingredient that will always help achieve success is consistency. Lets hope I can be consistent with this blogging lark. Its a challenge I entertained the idea of, let see where it goes. JW.