wearing my heart on my sleeve

I'm in a LOT of facebook photography groups, and for the past year I've just been amazed at the talent of the photographers around the world, and humbled by their work. In each of these groups there are people that share their work and ask for contructive criticism from their peers. I've never done this. I've never constructively criticized and I've never put my work out in hopes of getting criticized. I'm tender hearted, and I was so afraid that the consensus would be that I'm actually not as good as I thought. I ask for criticism from my family and friends. My sister is exceptional at this. She has no fear in telling me if a session lacks variety or if I am editing in an unflattering way. And I appreciate it so much because this is the kind of stuff that the untrained eye can see that a lot of times I'm to close to catch. My husband will do his "I like it" when I show him a picture and I'm fairly sure some of the time he's just humoring me, which is cool. He's been forced to look at a lot of pictures.

But I need criticism from photographers. I need to hear about technical mistakes and how to fix issues in the future. So yesterday I posted 10 pictures in a group, asked for constructive criticism and I held my breath. I got a lot of great responses, just overwhelmingly helpful critiques. The main thing people said I need to work on was already something that I knew I had an issue with, and that's consistency. So that will be my big focus for a while until I feel I have it figured out.

Anyway, the point of this post is to share with everyone that I'm always trying to improve. I'm watching youtube videos, asking for advice, learning about new techniques, trying new things, and now getting feedback from fellow photographers around the world.

Because yes, I think I'm good at what I do, but I can always learn something.