Motivation

What motivates us to do the things we do? Of course I can’t speak to what motivates you but I can think and write about what motivates me. I should have an idea at least!

As a photographer many things motivate me. I love the challenge of capturing images, especially capturing images that I have never tried to capture before. I very much enjoy that I know I will never know all that there is to know about the art. Photography is so vast that I just don’t have enough time to learn it all. Anyone that tells you that they do know it all doesn’t know how vast it truly is. But is this what actually motivates me to keep getting up in the morning?

There is a passion that I have for photography that I can’t explain. I know that the instant gratification of digital certainly helps keep me interested in trying a particular shot until I get it where I want it. That doesn’t explain what hooked me back in the 70s when I was thrust into a darkroom. I still remember the feeling I got when I watched that image appear on the paper.

That feeling is what motivates me. It is what makes me want to create every day and every day I do my best to create something. Some days it may not be an image, it may be an idea, it may even be helping someone else create something, but each and every day I need to create. At times I am not sure if it is motivation or obsession. I think my wife would say it’s probably both.

I hope that you are doing what you are motivated to do. Perhaps what you do for a living isn’t your passion, but hopefully you have the opportunity to feed that part of yourself. For a long time I worked at doing things I was very good at doing but I wasn’t motivated to do. Being the perfectionist that I am this left little or no time to do what I really wanted… no needed to do.

 

One day my sister was looking at an image I created and she said, “And you don’t do this for a living, why?” She was the first to say it but over the next few years she wasn’t the only one. Eventually I had to sit down and think, what was I afraid of? My father used to say I was afraid of success, my high school guidance counselor said I was afraid to fail, but when I thought of photography I wasn’t afraid of anything. I have to say here that this can be a bad thing but that is another story for another time. Suffice to say pay attention to what you are doing when trying to get the shot.

So if photography let me forget any fears I may (or may not) have, what was I waiting for? That is the day that Michael Albany Photography was born.

I specialize in shooting architecture and people. These two types of photography are far from each other. Where one is like herding cats, the other is like waiting for the sun to rise. Sometimes that is exactly what you need to do too, wait for the sun. The vast differences between them is what attracts me to both. They both feed different parts of me.

I see beauty in different places. I see it in the structure and lines in a building. I see it in the curves and subtle shadows of the human form. I see the life that once was in old abandoned buildings, and I see the life that has yet to come in a young face.

How can I not be motivated by that?

 

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