http://oca-student.com/node/82794
I've been following this thread in the OCA Coffee Shop student forum and can genuinely relate to it. Sometimes it takes hard pressure internally to move on with the exercises and reach the assignment stage of a module. I truly believe the old saying that 'procrastination is the thief of time' and that the internet also leads you away from what you really want to do.
But the main thing that keeps holding me back is the fear that what I do isn't good enough. I look around, especially as I live in a very 'arty' town, and see great pieces of work and wonder how the artist came up with the original idea and developed it on. I see my fellow camera enthusiasts produce pictures which I would give my right arm to have taken and my confidence drops another notch.
I have a new tutor for the Photography DPP level 1 module and he seems very knowledgeable but I find it quite hard to feel confident when I send my assignments off to him. By the time I finished People & Place in the Photography module, I had gained enough confidence in my tutor that he wouldn't trash it but consider the whole assignment and give constructive criticism. I was happy that I could accept what he said and move on. With a new tutor, who I haven't got the true measure of, I am very nervous to post off my work, albeit now in an electronic format which saves a lot in postage and insurance. I await my return email with its attached report nervously, yet when it's delivered into my Inbox, my work is generally praised so why did I worry?
It's all down to confidence, which ebbs and flows like the tide. In my lifetime I have found that as I become more confident, life has a bad habit of knocking me back. So I pick myself up, dust myself down (as the song goes) and start all over again. I think the main message of this post is to keep on trying, you can only get better, eventually.
