My relationship with photography has been a long, tumultuous road. Where most people go from hobby to career; I was the opposite. This was a job for me WAY before it was a passion. Over the years, I'd want to improve, so I'd get a book or take a class. But I never enjoyed them, thinking the teachers were too rigid and judgmental. It's funny how we see the world based on our own biases. Because in retrospect, now I see that it was ME who was all of those things. I used to think that for an image to be good, there had to be REASONS WHY. It had to COMMUNICATE. It had to be PROFOUND. These beliefs completely set me up for failure. More than that, it made my work stagnate, because the mountain of perfection is ALWAYS too hard to climb. So rather than attempt the impossible, I just continued doing my repetetive photography job. I'd get bored and quit for a while. Only to go back and get bored again. I did this for over ten years. Until one day, I completely burned out. I knew that I would never touch a camera again, if I couldn't find a way to be excited about it. So, I LET GO OF WHAT I THOUGHT A PHOTOGRAPHER WAS SUPPOSED TO BE. I decided that my expectations were complicating things; and that art according to me, was going to be simple. Do I like it? Am I drawn to it? Does it make me want to look for a few seconds longer? By letting go of the "shoulds" and the "what if I fail"s, I was able to take the risks that are necessary to be creative. Now for the first time in over a decade of working in this business, I can say that I love photography. And that things are often much simpler than we make them out to be.