Today, November 23rd, is Reflect on Anxiety Day, and I’m getting an early start on it because I’m winding down from a stressful day yesterday, and the stresses were rather widely divergent.
The first factor was, I picked up a new photography gig, but something that was out of my wheelhouse, which was/is showroom photography. Not the high-end stuff where items are brought into a studio for the promotional photos that will grace every advertisement thereafter (for which I know I’m unqualified,) but items within a display in a retail store, intended as much to show off the wide inventory of the store as the individual items. Nothing terribly difficult, but not something that I’d done much of before, and even that’s been a long time.
Now, I teach photography, and have studied a lot of different techniques and genres, if you will; there’s a part of me that internally critiques a lot of images that I see for how well they work and what might have been done better. So the job, in and of itself, shouldn’t have been stressful at all, and seriously wasn’t. What was stressful were the imagined expectations – not even what the client wanted, but what I perceived them as possibly wanting, exacting standards and high-end studio stuff. And ‘stressful’ is probably too strong a word, but there’s always a distinct amount of uncertainty when taking on a new job, that I think everyone suffers from, and a certain amount of, ‘Make sure you’re thinking of everything – no fumbles, no silly mistakes, don’t forget the lens cap,’ kind of thing. [It’s impossible to forget the lens cap on an SLR, but I’m from the tail end of an era when that was actually a thing, and I believe I actually accomplished it once, with my old rangefinder camera.]
At the same time, I knew what I was doing, as well as how to express some of the potential pitfalls to the client – things like uneven lighting and cluttered backgrounds that would make an image much weaker. So my confidence and my semi-imagined anxiety were clashing a little – again, nothing serious, but almost amusing in retrospect, after the session when I’d had a chance to settle into my groove, as well as speak at greater length to the client. And as I typed the above portion, the images were downloading from the card; now I’ve done an initial perusal, and I feel even more comfortable. I think I managed to make the store seem much less cluttered than it actually was, and kept focus on the excellent settings that they had. I hate to say, ‘cluttered,’ (here’s that anxiety again – isn’t this fun?), because they did well with the space, but they had a serious buttload of inventory on the floor; call it a clash between the photographer that wants distinct subjects without distractions, everything ideal, and a retailer that’s optimizing the space for sales.
I went through something similar with wedding photography, many years ago. My biggest concern when I tackled it was, ‘Would I be able to interact with the guests effectively?’ I’d never been an outgoing person, never a partier, never an ‘Alpha,’ (stupid term) – much more introverted, quiet, and so on. That’s not the kind of person that works as a wedding photographer. I knew what that type of person was, but the anxiety over that was, ‘Can I be that person? Will the guests recognize me as a charlatan, a poseur?’ Could I even take control of the myriad guests for those aspects that required a bit of direction, group shots and such?
This is where I got my full understanding of, “Fake it ’til you make it,” because I had no other choice. I went into it as if I was the confident, comfortable, commanding-but-friendly presence that I wasn’t – and found out that I was, or at least could be as the situation demanded. And it fed itself – the immediate feedback where people did as I asked and complied without reservations or any visual resentment let me stop feeling anxious about it at all. In truth, the whole judgmental thing, I think, gets instilled in us in school and takes us a long time to get rid of, while adults rarely bother with it; no one really thinks, ‘Is this a real wedding photographer?’, they just assume that you are and everything’s golden. So that’s my tip – it’s probably a lot less judgmental than you might believe, so put that aspect out of your head and be confident in your abilities.
[Another aside: This background-level insecurity still remains with my wildlife photography. I see plenty of work from other photographers that blows mine out of the water, not to mention the various things that I see in my own photos that, ‘could be better.’ So how do other people see it? I mean, I know there’s a huge disparity among viewers, but on average? There’s virtually no feedback, so I’m left to puzzle it out for myself – but at least I know that I should always be working to improve regardless.]
So now the other aspect of stress from yesterday. I was awakened by a phone call from The Girlfriend’s Sprog and her SO, who were stranded on the side of the road (on the way to the airport) when the car died. The first bit was fine: get out there quickly and get them to the airport – full credit to them for having left early, so there was no chance of them missing the flight. The next bit was much more complicated: What was wrong with the car? Could I determine this on the roadside? Could I fix this on the roadside, or would it have to be towed? And the standard bit when working on cars, because I’ve never received the slightest instruction in this at all: Am I evaluating it correctly, and not missing anything? Am I going to make matters worse?
In the middle of this, by the way, was the scheduled photography gig.
Long story short: I discovered the problem without much difficulty, and the necessary part was available not too far away. I only had time to buy it before I was due down at the photo job, so repairs had to wait until that was through. But then they also had to be accomplished on the side of a ridiculously busy interstate, and if you notice, today’s another holiday in the US, so, traffic. Whizzing by a couple of meters away, including from my head as I was poking out from under the traffic side of the car. All of this I consider fully-justified stress, not at all dependent on my interpretations or imagination. One idiot fucking with their smutphone or swerving to avoid another idiot and I was done for, gruesomely. The only other option was to have the car towed, and I consider that a last resort.
It worked out, easier than many repair jobs that I’ve tackled, but I did have to get The Girlfriend’s help with it since portions required two people, and she wasn’t thrilled about this either. Like me, however, she considered it a necessary risk, and we managed just fine – tense as hell, mind you, but successful. We even managed to merge two vehicles into crowded, high-speed traffic afterward without too much difficulty.
But it also meant acid stomachs for both of us that greatly limited our meal choices last night, and waking up sore as hell from the muscles protesting the various positions I’d asked of them. Not to mention that I got absolutely nothing else done yesterday at all. Already behind on my posting schedule.