A Swan on the Danube
Last week I found these super old photos on my computer. I took them with my first camera (a Nikon D3200) only a few month after I had bought it.
I had so much fun shooting these pictures! It was the morning before Christmas Eve, the sun was just coming up, the mood was perfect, and this swan presented itself as if it had just waited for someone to show up and take its picture.
But when I came home it didn’t take long to let myself get completely discouraged. It took a more experienced photographer than I was only seconds to point out that my shots where way too dark, that my ISO was up way too high, and that most pictures had a terrible framing, because I was too busy hunting down the swan and too inexperienced to keep an eye on everything else going on around it. I did’t look at the pictures again for years!
When I found these pictures again after all this time, I smiled. Not just because I remembered all the fun I had taking them, but also because now I was able to see the potential they had. A few minutes of editing here and there, a bit of a newly learned “no one has to be perfect”-attitude, and voila, I am actually proud to show you these pictures I took of a swan on the Danube on a morning before Christmas Eve more that 5 years ago.
What’s to learn from that? Don’t let discouragement or imperfection take away from you the satisfaction and joy you get out of trying something new. I had missed out on learning as much as possible from my mistakes and on a great memory to cherish, by feeling worse about my work than would have been necessary.
