There’s nothing like meeting with marketing consultants and agencies at work to make you feel green and unaccomplished in your own photography initiatives. My rational self reassures me I’m young, I’ve just started, I need to be kind to myself. My competitive, inner perfectionist favors instant gratification over a learning curve.

The culprit for my self-loathing, inner freak out was when one marketing firm asked to view our media library to take a gander at what they’d be working with as far as quality of images. Fair enough. And I thought hey, I know I’ve got some great shots of projects. Well much to my dismay, I learned the valuable lesson of shooting raw rather than in jpeg. Now in my self-study, I’ve come across the important of this but I kind of placed it on the back-burner until I start to get my barrings about me as I progress in skill. I thought the main advantage of raw files was more about the editing aspect afterwards rather than the file size and quality in raw. In other words, for high-res, billboard, top-of-the-line printing work, jpeg just doesn’t cut it. BUT…”you’re images are great ‘b-roll’ material, so that’s good news.” And to a prideful, competitive individual, those words were like daggers, completely deflating my balloon.

BUT…with the constructive words of criticism also came words of praise. “You’ve got the eye, you know what you’re looking for, you know what works.” Ahhh, and she’s back in the game! I like you John Smith (not his real name, could ya tell?), good save.

So that’s what keeps me going. The confidence that my eyes are always the camera lens and I’m learning how to translate that to actual prints. I know what I want. I can see it. I can envision it. I just need to hone it. And so as a reminder to myself that ‘I know I can’, this featured image is of 2 things I’ve successfully made. The lemon plant you see here was grown on a whim. I just popped a lemon seed from a fresh lemon into the soil (without much confidence from some who shall not be mentioned that it would grow might I add) but with a little hope and a healthy dose of water, well there she be. Next to it is the homemade sunscreen I made. I’m super excited about this and really looking forward to using it.

Cheers to I know I can!