One cold and sunny Saturday in December, Mike and I bundled ourselves up in our warmest coats, hats, gloves and scarves and joined a tour group venturing out to the Forbidden City. Constructed from 1406 to 1420, and serving as the home of Chinese emperors, the Palace Museum, as it is now known, was the cultural and political centre of China for over 500 years. It’s not every day that you get to visit a site with those cultural credentials (did I mention that it’s the most valuable piece of real estate anywhere in the world?) so I hung my trusty Canon 5D Mk IV around my neck, and secretly hoped that the cold would keep the flocks of tourists at bay, and the snow would make the Palace even more picturesque than usual.
The day was freezing and the tour guide’s pace was relentless, but occasionally I took my gloves off and captured a few images, and by the end of the day I’d taken about 300 shots. When we got home, I uploaded the images to my computer… and I saw to my great distress that they were all rubbish. The lighting was terrible. Some were blurry. My framing was all over the place. I’d failed to look beyond the crowds to capture the essential beauty and elegance of the extraordinary architecture. I looked at the phone photos being shared on the tour group’s WeChat, and wondered why I’d bothered to take my good camera at all. Despair set it. This, clearly, was the day when any creative talent I’d ever had had chosen to abandon me. I’d failed to make the most of this rare chance to photograph one of the world’s most iconic historic sites (blanketed in snow, no less!) and I’d probably never have that opportunity again.
Believing that I may as well try to salvage at least a few shots, I opened Adobe Bridge and started to get rid of the worst of them. I immediately deleted anything that was clearly unusable – why had I even taken that shot of the back of someone’s traditional Hanfu costume? – and kept those few that showed any glimmer of promise. I got rid of about half of the shots in that first cull. Then I started the process again. Eventually I was left with about 80 photos that I thought I could possibly do something with. I opened Lightroom and worked on those 80 images, straightening horizons, tweaking contrasts, cropping to remove anything distracting from the edges of the frame, and experimenting to see whether greyscale might work better for some shots than colour. By the end of that process, I had about 40 edited images that I quite liked, about 15 of which I thought had some actual merit. I shared nine images on Facebook and Instagram and pinned as many to the top of my WeChat Moments, and then I began to wonder whether I could interest a magazine in publishing any of them…
Welcome, my friends, to my creative process. Zero to hero (and very rapidly straight back again), EVERY SINGLE TIME I undertake any sort of creative endeavour. Tell me… Is it just me?
It took me a really long time to recognise this pattern. In fact, I didn’t recognise it. Mike did. He was already in bed one night when I got home from shooting an event. On my return I’d gone straight to my desk to upload the photos onto my computer – never go to bed with a night’s worth of photographs entrusted only to an SD card! – and I’d taken a quick look at them after they’d uploaded. As I crawled into bed, Mike asked how the night had gone. “It was fun,” I said, “but the photos are a disaster. I’m not sure there’s anything there that I can even share.” He said, “I think we may have been here before. Go to sleep and take another look in the morning.” I did and he was right. In the morning I did the first cull and started to be able to see some gems in the raw. I edited those gems until they sparkled. Then I fell in love with them. And by the time I’d finished editing all the photos and shared the image gallery with the client, I was wondering why anyone would ever employ any photographer other than me.
It's an incredible relief to know this about myself. It’s just the way my fragile little ego works, and knowing that makes me much more able to get a handle on it, and also to keep the workings of my grubby little mind to myself. It wasn’t always so… When I was first engaged by I Am Woman Magazine to shoot a feature and cover, I went and did the shoot and was thrilled with it; interacting with people and capturing the best of them is my favourite part of the job. Then when I got home and uploaded the photos I was horrified. I called the magazine’s publisher and editor to tell them that the photos were terrible, and I was mortified to have to confess that I didn’t have anything worth sending them. They didn’t have time for a reshoot so asked me to just send them what I had. They got back to me straightaway and told me that they loved the photos and wondered what the hell I’d been talking about. So I don’t share my insecurities with my clients anymore. The insecurities are still there but they’re my burden to carry, not my clients’. It’s unfair and unhelpful to ask them to help me carry that load. They’re got their own stuff going on. They shouldn’t have add “pander to the photographer’s fragile ego” to their to-do list.
I wish I could say that this creative insecurity only applies to my photography, but I’m realising that it works that way pretty much across the board. When I bought my house way back in 2006, I read home decorating magazines and garnered inspiration from other people’s homes, then I chose a palette of bold and interesting colours, bought the paint, and gave my house keys to a mate that I was paying to decorate while I was away on a work trip. When I got back I was horrified. What had I been thinking?! Who was it that gave me – me?! – permission to make decorative decisions about this beautiful 150-year-old house? But then I lived with the colours and I started to love them. They weren’t to everyone’s taste, but they were to mine, and given that the house was mine and mine alone, that was all that mattered.
I’ve started to think of my creative process as being a little like shopping for souvenirs in a souk or a market. When I’ve shopped in the Old City in Jerusalem or Psar Chaa in Siem Reap or more recently in the floating Muslim village of Koh Panyi in Thailand, I’ve been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff. Just as I lose my appetite when I’m confronted by an overwhelming array of food at a buffet, I get blinded by huge quantities of things that stallholders are desperate for me to buy, and I can barely distinguish the tacky T-shirts and elephant trousers from the lacquered coconut shells and cheap pearls and batik scarves. But when I start to think about who I’m buying for and what they like and the precise things that I might like to buy for myself, I can stop seeing the more obvious tat, and start focusing my eyes on the small things that might have some value and beauty. And when I take those things home, away from the overwhelming quantity of stuff that surrounded them, and tell my friends the stories of why I thought they might like this particular Cambodian god of dance or this piece of hand-painted Palestinian pottery, I’m glad to have edited things down, to have made choices, to have picked out a thing of beauty from all the detritus.
I read somewhere recently that writing is all about making choices. (And when I remember where I read it I promise I’ll share the link!). It turns out that all creative processes are. We choose the topic we’re going to write about, the angle from which we’re going to take the photograph, the time of day at which we’ll paint an iconic site. And then we have to trust ourselves that our choices are valid. We might have made a different choice, but we made this one, and that’s OK. We have to trust that we’ve done this before, this act of creation, and that we’ll do it again. We’ve done what we felt compelled to do and made the best choices according to the information and access and resources we had to hand when we made them. People may respond to our creative endeavours and they may not. Our art is ours and ours alone. We might have had moments of insecurity along the way but we’ve set them aside for long enough to make a thing of beauty or interest or usefulness from all the detritus. We’ve expressed something we felt about the world, and offered it up to others. It’s a small thing, and it’s everything, and it’s all OK.
So moving ! Your work is gorgeous and how wonderful to have a partner who can nudge you and make you take a second look at your own work !
Love these shots Michelle. Brings back a lot of memories of my own trip in 98. I spent a month inside China, starting in Hong Kong. We did over 10,000 miles of flying within the country it was amazing. Xian, Great Wall, Chongqiing, Beijing, Shanghai, etc.
my favorites were the Forbidden and the river cruising down the Li River near Guiling.
Amazing country we could feel the power and see the color bursting forth 25 years ago.