Photogeddon - Day 7

 

Photogeddon - Self Portrait

 To mark the successful completion of my first week of Photogeddon, let me restate my 12 steps to becoming a better photographer and person in this world.

1. I will stay involved in developing myself and others. I will go to the overnight shoot with fellow photographers, rain, sleet, snow and inner critic be damned, and I will experiment and play but most of all I will have fun.
2. I will share my results with you here. Good, bad or indifferent; I will share and accept feedback constructively, even when the feedback isn’t so constructive.
3. I will help others. I am going to help others improve their craft and develop their voice.
4. I will believe in others.
5. I will motivate myself. I will watch Zack’s Transform video as well as his Creative Live series again. I will read informational and motivational blog posts.
6. I will take five photos each and every day. I will share these photos here with the title of Photogeddon – Day X.
7. I will try; day after day, week after week and month after month. This means every day I will do something new and stop living/reliving in yesterday’s success/failure.
8. I will continue to develop myself. I will attend Joel Zak’s Artist’s Way for Photographers workshop in January. I will attend Kevin Kubota’s Digital Photography Bootcamp® next year and each year following I will attend two or more workshops.
9. I will believe in myself. If I can’t believe in myself, how can I believe in others? I have the knowledge. I have the talent. I have the drive. I just have to believe it and I will from now on.
10. I will put my foot in the ass of all my critics; my inner critic included. There will be no more fear in my life. No fear of failure. No fear of success. No fear of disappointing myself or others.  
11. I will take one day off from my day job per month and spend that day developing my photographic voice and style. This is not an exercise of mimicking others, but actually developing my own voice, my style, my own self.




Photogeddon - Negative World


12. I will share my voice with the world.

So what have I done to accomplish the goals set forth? Well here is the list:

1. I have challenged myself to help shoot a wedding and I have read about and applied a new post-processing technique.
2. I have posted results from the wedding, the good, the bad and the indifferent.
3. I have helped others. I helped Chris David with his wedding shoot, I helped Nathan Smith with his senior portrait shoot. I have posted two free presets for Lightroom to allow others to have the tools to make their work better in post. I attended the Local Help Portrait planning meeting and made value added contributions to the meeting.
4. I had absolute faith in my fellow photographers to meet their obligations and they did.
5. I watched Zack Arias' Transform video as well as his Creative Live Series, or at least part of the series.
6. I have taken 5 new photos each day and posted them on my blog for feedback and people are actually providing feedback.
7. I have shot something different each and everyday. I have went some place new and photographed something new. I have not tried to recreate a past success or improve and past failure. I have focused on producing something new each and every day; Monday - Construction; Tuesday - Water, Wednesday - Senior Portraits; Thursday - Different Subjects (Morning, Flower, Lines, Bee, Waterfall)
8. I am signed up for Joel Zak's workshop and I also actively pursued the SummitUp workshop contest on Twitter and won. Not only do I get to go to this workshop, but I get to take someone with me and I chose to bring Nathan Smith. So in addition to developing myself I am also able to let my success be the success of others photographers as well, all because of Kubota's generosity.




Photogeddon - Spooky


9. This is a constant issue I have to work on. I believe in myself where I am comfortable, but have less faith in myself where I am not. But getting a second senior shoot under my belt, thanks to Nathan and a wedding under my belt thanks to Chris David, I believe in my abilities more and more each day.
10. I received a negative comment on one of photos that I posted on Flickr. I actually responded to negative comment to try and figure out why my photo was rated so low by this person. His response was to my inquiry was, "I just didn't like it." So rather let it eat away at me, I took joy in the fact that the majority of others did like it.
11. I have not done this yet, but it is coming soon.
12. I posted an entire series of articles on my blog  on the death of creativity and I have received some feedback, both in person and via email. This means my voice is being heard and people are responding.

So for the rest of this long photogeddon post, I am just going to show you the remainder of photos from today.

Photogeddon - In the Grain

Photogeddon - Paranoia