My photos rarely come out how I want them to (because I don’t take enough pictures), and that puts me off taking any more photos because they all seem ‘bad’ to me. It’s a sort of reinforcing cycle.
I try to take pictures of interesting subjects, in interesting lighting etc., but find myself putting the camera back into the drawer for another 2 months before I pick it up again and go through the same cycle. It’s almost like I’d rather take no pictures than bad pictures.
Is this normal, or am I just insane? I neglected taking my camera on my last trip abroad because of this feeling.
You have fallen into the trap, the lie really, that there is some perfection, some single goal that you must achieve. Generally, this does not come from examples of people who have actually achieved something interesting. The world is full of sheep, seeking to flock with other sheep. Modern cameras have given the sheep “skills” that allow them to flock better. They justify it all to each other by going on and on about their “tools” and how they can focus so perfectly, or stop motion so perfectly, or have super high pixel counts and burst rates. It’s how sheep entertain each other. It is called bleating. All it produces is yet another “perfect” photo of a bird doing something, in absolutely perfect focus, stopped in time, taken from a row of 50 that look virtually identical, but from which this one has been deemed “perfect.”
You can join these sheep if you like, or you can just do what you do and stop judging yourself by what they do. The world doesn’t NEED what they do. It also doesn’t need most of what anybody does. So just do what you want to do. Learn what you want to learn. Don’t lose the enjoyment of it by wasting energy thinking it needs to be “perfect” in some way.
Sit down, figure out what YOU like and don’t like about your photos. Then work on that. It’s that simple. Some of the greatest photos ever taken don’t fit the paradigm of modern sheep photography, and were taken on gear nobody would cross the street for anymore. So you are not really bound by any of it. When you accept that, and start being honest with yourself about it, you can improve.