They laughed at my photos. What I learned 35 years later.

Back in 1991, my boss and photography mentor at the time laughed at my photos and told me they were horrible. Now, if you've ever gotten a negative comment or a disappointing response on a photo that you were proud of, then you know how fast your confidence can be crushed. So what I learned over the next 35 years changed the way I judge my own ability and it may change the way you judge yours as well. For a long time, I think a lot of us have treated the creative eye like talent. You either have it or you don't. Now, some people can walk into an ordinary location and see an amazing image, but the rest of us might walk right past it. Am I right? And when you see someone creating images you wish you could create, it's easy to think they just have an eye for this and I don't. But I don't believe that anymore because I wasn't born seeing images the way I see them today. I had to learn how to see them. So let's go back to 1991 and I was really proud of my photos then and I was learning, experimenting, trying to figure this whole photography thing out and then my confidence was crushed by that one person. Now, let me know in the comments if you can relate to this. My confidence was demolished because when you create something, there's a little piece of you in it, right? You saw something. You made choices. You pressed the shutter thinking, yeah, I love that and then someone tears it apart. Not in a way that helps you improve. They just make you feel like maybe you're not very good at this and those moments can stick with you. So you start second guessing yourself. Maybe I don't have the talent. Maybe I don't have the creative eye everyone else has. Maybe other people can see things I can't and that's what I thought. But I kept going and I'm glad I did because photography has changed my life. So when I look at those early images now and compare them to what I create today, I can see something I couldn't see back then and the biggest change wasn't my camera. It wasn't a better lens. It wasn't photoshop. I changed. More specifically, I trained my brain to see things I hadn't noticed before. All right, so here's the thing. You're not born with a creative eye. You train it. So think about when you learned to drive for the first time. You had to think about everything, right? So your speed, the brakes, traffic, where your hands were on the steering wheel, where the car was in the lane. There was a lot going on, right? But after enough repetition, your brain started processing those things without you having to think about every one of them. Seeing images works much the same way. So at first, you may walk into a scene and just see a waterfall, a tree, a bird, a mountain, a person. But as you train your eyes, you start seeing more. You notice where the light is falling. You realize maybe the scene in front of you is boring. So what do you do? You pick up your camera and maybe you move 20 feet to the right, and then everything clicks. And you start to notice the relationship between colors, the shapes, lines, texture. And you begin asking, what caught my attention? What is this image about? What belongs? What doesn't? Where should the viewer look first? And the more you make those decisions, the better you get at seeing the possibilities before you ever press the shutter. That's the difference between taking an image and creating one. And it doesn't happen because you memorize 100 composition rules. It happens because you start paying attention to the decisions behind the image. So you create something, you look at the result, and then you ask yourself, what worked? What didn't? What could I have changed? And then you go out and do it again, over and over. That feedback starts training your brain. And little by little, things you had to force yourself to notice start becoming things you see without thinking about them. That's what happened to me. Not overnight, not because someone handed me a camera and I had some magical gift. I trained my eye for years and I'm still training it because there's always something else to see. So if you look at your images today and they're not where you want them to be, don't look at someone else's work and decide they were born with something you weren't. I started with many of the same doubts you might be having right now. And in time, I learned to see the image that I had envisioned before I pressed the shutter. The difference between then and now isn't talent. It's the decisions I made, the mistakes I made, the experiments, the practice, and the feedback I got from other photographers like you can get in my photography community. Just comment community if you'd like to join. So little by little, all of that helped me see and create the images I'm proud of today. So the next time you raise your camera, don't ask yourself whether you have a creative eye. Ask yourself instead, what am I seeing that I didn't notice before? So learning to see changes what you notice before you press the shutter. But seeing the possibilities is only part of creating the image you have in mind. There's another part of photography I had to rethink completely and it exposed a mistake I made in a photography course that's been watched more than a million times. Watch this video next and I'm going to show you what I got wrong.