Yesterday I woke up and wanted to listen to the tunes of All my friends by LCD soundsystem. A song nobody from my family or friends understand. But a song that will feel like home for my WUN friends. I didn’t realise until later that it has been 1 year. 1 year since the workshop, and yesterday also should have been the date for the Copenhagen WUN conference.
For the start of this story I have to take you back 1 year to the beautiful Lofoten islands. I was there participating in the wayupnorth workshop, where I met all these beautiful strangers, likeminded creative people. But each with their own “luggage”. In that short timespan they all really grew on me, and I really would like to think of them as distant friends for life.
My video impression
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The assignment
On day 1 we got the assignment that by the end of the day we all had to select and show 5 images to the group. That day I was struggling a bit with myself, maybe it was stress because of the assignment, because I wanted to “deliver” just like I would want to do o a real assignment. Agitated, because I couldn’t really control all of it. The scenery over there alone makes your whole creative mind EXPLODE! Or maybe I was just scared that my images wouldn’t be good enough compared to the others.
That whole day I was trying to push myself to get 5 picture that would satisfy ME, I wanted the picture to be a different than those of the other people in the group ? Why was that ? Am I really THAT guy who wants to be better ? Do I just want to be a perfectionist ?
That evening everybody dove into Lightroom to select their favourites, so did I, of the hundreds of images,I had 3 images that I liked, not 5… So at the time that just felt I failed myself.
After dinner everybody presented their pictures. One by one everybody his/her images popped on screen. I genuinely liked everybody’s work. Some of the images were similar to images I had in my Lightroom catalogue… but for some reason I loved those pictures when shot by someone else, but I discarded those similar images in my own catalogue …. Never good enough for me ? Too hard on myself ?
One by one everybody presented their pictures, I was last in line….My heart beating in my throat, my 5 images popped up on screen. When it was done and I noticed that the other photographers also reacted positive to mine, I kinda cracked and teared up. I was afraid that others wouldn’ t like my work , but I was equally scared to expect that others would like my work.
It has been a year now, maybe a trip to the psychiatrist would have been faster… but I feel I have closure now.
Don’t ever let Self doubt lead to self destruction of your creative soul.
My image from day one
My day 2 favourites
