birds.photos

I push myself pretty hard. That’s one of the reasons my work keeps improving. The flip side is the better I get, the more pressure I put on myself. As my work improves, my standards rise with it – and the higher those standards get, the harder they become to meet. 

Good isn’t good enough for me anymore.

After every shoot, I look through the pictures I took, find the best one and then ask myself – “is this good enough to hold its own alongside my best work?” Sometimes the answer to that question is no. Sometimes I can go multiple shoots in a row where the answer remains no. 

Then I get that nagging voice in my head that says “you’re in a rut…”

I think it’s important to maintain high standards. I see a lot of photographers sharing every picture they take on social media – that approach doesn’t work for me. I don’t want to be comfortable with mediocrity and I don’t want you to see my mediocre work.

But just because everything I post is of the highest standard I am capable of, doesn’t mean that I don’t also take a lot of ordinary pictures. I have to take several hundred mediocre images to get one excellent one. 

At the end of a shoot, the difference between meeting my standards and not tends to be this: I don’t really have to ask myself if I’ve got something good enough to hold its own alongside my best work – I already know, because I knew the minute the shutter clicked.

There’s no better feeling.