When the work doesn't feel like yours, even though you showed up fully
Last month I spent a full afternoon shooting in a district I'd been wanting to explore for years. Narrow passages, construction scaffolding everywhere, crowds that wouldn't thin out. I kept adjusting, kept finding angles, kept working. Hours of it.
When I sat down to go through the images later, something felt off. The photos weren't bad. Some had real texture, real life in them. But the body of work didn't feel like mine. Too many compromises forced by the conditions. Too many frames where I was reacting instead of seeing. I know the constraints were real, I know I did what I could with what was in front of me. And yet I've been avoiding the folder ever since.
What unsettles me is that the gap isn't between good and bad. It's between what I made and what I recognize as my own voice. That gap creates a kind of block I wasn't expecting. Not a lack of motivation, more like a loss of trust in my own eye.
Have any of you finished a body of work where the conditions were honest, the effort was real, but the result just didn't carry your fingerprint? How did you move through that feeling and get back to editing, or creating, without letting it define the next project?
Sometimes a days images don’t register, reflect my expectations
And other days the images surpass my expectations.
Light has a mind of its own and couldn’t care less about my expectations.
Get back out there with no expectations and watch your magic happen.