Is Perfectionism Killing Your Photography?

I’ll start! I was the queen of chasing after perfection.

There used to be this inconsistency with how I would feel from session to session. There would be times when I would show up to a family session and the kids would be wild and I would get the best photos ever! Then there were times when on the surface the family would be perfectly dressed and the parents would have the kids prepped and following directions and the images fell flat. What was I missing?

The photo above is of my daughter, Lola, taken 5 years ago. This image is the embodiment of how I view her spirit as her mother. At 4 she was constantly moving, jumping off furniture, messy, dancing, a beautiful little whirlwind. We went to the lake that day and she immediately took off her dress and ran to the water. Splashing and getting mud and sand everywhere on her.

She is now 9 years old and people often tell me when they meet her for the first time that "she's their spirit animal". I think the reason is because us adults sometimes have lost that thing that makes us want to experience life to its fullest. To touch, hear, taste, smell and REALLY see the world around us. Seeing it embodied in a child really reminds us of who WE are deep down. How powerful is that?

I realized that what I was missing consistently from family session to family session was embracing the “messy.” See when things are too perfect it starts to lose the heart and soul of what makes a photograph powerful. Humans inherently are not perfect and what if we viewed that as the very thing that puts heart and soul into our photography?

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