Dawn

After a bit of soul searching and trying to figure out why the feck I actually started photography in the first place, why I invested so much into this hobby-turned-profession - I didn't end up much further from where I began. What started as a quest for me to become a better photographer, and lead me to here, had no real birth or reason. I was doing it, to a degree, because It enabled me to do little creative edits and to supplement my design and vector work. In a way, it was a resource-maker and part-time snapshot-of-my-life thing.

I was already deeply involved with video and design at this point and what eventually came to be what I loved was the art of telling stories . That was my thing. That was my goal. My passion. I was alone in the world, I had almost no friends and through DeviantART and Photography Groups, I started talking to people. People liked what I did and for once I felt some value to myself. It gave me a personality, friends, a little bit of cash here and there and It made me want to be more, to create more and better and better. My ideas were somewhat okay but my technique was terrible.

This lead to the beginning of the end and the end of a beginning. The end of creativity and the beginning of technicality.

That path lead me to here in my life , where I know the moves but don't know what song to play. I struggle thinking creatively, beyond the function of an image. Like a minion of a big agency with no space for creativity, only for frequency and function. Design Principles in Photography.

Needless to say this path has made me incredibly unhappy and has not lead to much success either. What I excelled at was too "perfect" and "lifeless", it lacked any form of reality and almost became "obviously fake", almost like how I felt of myself. I was creating bland work that had no life in it, because I was not immersing myself with life, but rather "survival". Work has dried up quite a lot for me now and in many ways I feel like I deserve it for being so boring, for lack of a better word. There are many sayings about finding oneself but only one which says "You never find yourself - you create yourself."

I am not the person I feel I can be, no where NEAR that person. Im still trying to figure out who that person really is, to be honest. I really want to be able to afford in my career to go out and see my friends and see places in this country. To be able to not worry every day about paying the bills but still being free enough to make my own choices. Maybe I shouldn't be a freelancer, maybe I should be in a different field all together. Maybe I should go see a therapist ( if I could even afford one ) and try get over this damned self-esteem issue, learn to accept compliments or "feel" them maybe.

I have no idea what Im doing.

This begins by starting to try and return back to that part of myself. The person who cared more about creating something interesting than shiny polish. I don't know how to return there, to be honest. I dont know how to let go to a degree. But Id like to try none-the-less.

So the work you might see from me might be very different, or very similar, depending on how long you've known my work. Id like to make a fresh start in a way, with a new focus.

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This was shot at a shoot with Paul David, a very talented Photographer friend of mine at a shoot of his for a stylist and submission into a magazine. I was there to grab some photo's in-between, shoot some behind the scenes and assist him with shooting in general. It was before even sunlight when we started this shoot so as the sun was creeping over the horizon, I grabbed this shot.

Taken on a Canon 5D MK II with a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8