Acknowledging "faults"...

As I said in my last post, I cannot promise that each of my daily photos will be good, but they will represent my growth as a photographer, and hopefully as a person. So part of becoming a better photographer, I am learning, is facing my fears. I am reading a book right now called, Coaching the Artist Within, by Eric Maisel, Ph. D. In my reading last night, he talked about how dangerous it is for an artist to side with one part of any "duality". The one that spoke to me the most was the duality between simplicity and complexity. I have always told myself that I am more interested in creating work that is simplistic, because I have always felt that beauty is in the simple things. I feel the same way about all things from a drumbeat to an sunset. But in dedicating myself to that one "side", I have been cheating myself of opportunities to tell new stories through my work.

This made me realize that I had been so tied to this idea of simplicity simply due to my fears of 1) learning to use Photoshop and 2) not being as good as other photographers at it. So, time to move on. No more allowing my fears to limit my work. So, after about 5 hours of frustration and hair pulling (ending in about 20 minutes of Craig figuring out how to use it and showing me), I have begun to crack the code of Photoshop layers. This photo is one that I have had in my head for about 6 years, and it is not even near how I imagined it. But it's a start. The story behind it is my nose. It was always my least favorite feature. In fact, I actually put down a thousand dollars to change it once. Until I realized it was one of the few features linking me to my Mayan ancestors. This is definitely one I want to improve upon, but here are my first efforts at "complexity", also known as Photoshop layering.