Self reflection

I have never been the type of person who has masses of confidence, but find that I can express myself by using photography. After starting at Fisheye, I was very nervous about how premature my photographic skills were and felt that I had a heap of things to learn. Over a period of nine months, on the job training and some confidence building boosts from the head of photography I finally felt ready to study photography.

For the first five months of my on the job training I spent most of this time practising and perfecting shooting perfect pack shots of everything from fairy washing up liquid to jam and toilet rolls. Then one Monday morning, my boss told me that he was going to set me a creative brief and I had the scope to do what I wanted and be creative.

One of the hardest things I have battled with is allowing others to look at my work. Working within a team of 4 photographers it has helped me enormously with this. At first I was very shy as criticism can be cruel, but after several months you get used to the idea that everyone looks at pictures in different ways. What one person finds amazing, striking and eye catching another person may not even bat an eye lid at.

After overcoming this barrier, I have been able to discuss my work and therefore gain tips and ideas of how to improve and create different effects to create the perfect shot.

This I think has worked to my advantage as with being on this course I can apply them. Simple things such as adding reflectors with holes cut out and baffling light off can create some great effects and make images look more realistic and life like, rather than appearing as though they have been shot in a studio.

For the second week of my course, we were asked to bring in 5 of our favourite images and explain why they had been chosen. I decided to show two of my own pieces, for a couple of reasons. I feel that I have moved on enormously with my own confidence and can to show my work to a group of people and feel self assured that I have tried the best that I can. It also allowed me to receive feedback from fourteen people that I did not know very well and therefore gave me real criticism. I find that when people know you well, they tend to soften how they express if they do not like something so not to hurt feelings.

With this new found confidence in my creative ability I feel like I have accomplished a lot and come a long way from when I first started in this industry.

I hope that within the next few months this new found confidence will continue to generate and I will feel more at ease when doing things like presentations in front of the class.