Kids are limitless. They create without fear of judgement or of not being good enough. Adults are the ones who become limited; we lose our creative edge, our imagination. We become afraid. We predict failure for ourselves, and kill an idea before it's even been started. Our fear diminishes our creative liberty. Adults are hung up on perfection. Kids create just for the sake of creating.
In middle school and early in high school, I loved taking photos. I used a simple, pink point and shoot digital camera that I got for Christmas one year. I would come home from school, grab my camera, and head outside to see what I could take photos of that day. Anything from the sun, my dad's Bobcat bulldozer that was taking up too much space, myself, or a new book I'd bought. I would transfer them onto our old desktop, use a random editing program I found for free on Google, and upload them to Flickr. These photos never saw the light of day (at least not by anyone I know), and I never really told anyone about my after-school hobby. It was something I enjoyed for and by myself. I had the freedom to create without fear of judgement or failure.
I'm currently working on my creative project for my senior thesis, and I'm taking photos again for a print magazine. This time it's with a Nikon D3200 and a lens that could probably cover all of my trips to Starbucks in the past year or so (that's a lot). This time, it's photos of other people with forethought about background, set-up, lighting, clothing, theme, colors, etc. To be frank, it's intimidating as hell to me. I'd been putting off so much of the overall project, and I didn't understand why. I should be excited about this, right? My roommate simply said, "It's because you're scared." And she was right. I was scared of failure. I was scared the photos would come out horribly--or worse, not horribly, but not good. Maybe they wouldn't be up to my professor's standards. Maybe the whole thing would be a big flop.
I'm still scared, but remembering when I would take photos without consideration for quality and doing it for fun has helped. Maybe my creative project won't be up to the ASME's standards, Condé Nast's, my professor's, or even my friends'. But if I can create something that I'm proud of and that I enjoyed doing, then that's just limitless.
