Don’t Seek Praise, Seek Criticism

Posted: 11/02/2010 in sport,photography,camera,northern Ireland,UK,Nikon,Photographer

I’ve had a lot of jobs recently were the Photographer can’t stop showing me the back of their camera !

Eh ? what you think of that picture ? is the sort of thing they say, waiting for me or anyone else to massage their ego.

It is quite easy to get approval if we ask enough people, or if we ask those who are likely to tell us what we want to hear.

They will probably say nice things rather than be too critical. Also, we tend to edit out the bad so we hear only what we want to hear.

So, if you produced a pleasantly acceptable piece of work, you will have proved to yourself that it’s good simply because others have told you so.

It probably is OK. But then it’s probably not great either.

If instead of seeking approval, you ask,

” What’s wrong with this ? “

” How can i make it better ? “

then you will get a truthful, Critical answer.  You may even get an idea to help improve your original idea, but are still in a position to reject the criticism if you think they are wrong.

40724801chimping

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s