All photos © Armando Bellmas

I re-read a post recently on Christine Kane’s blog about powerful intent. (It’s a wonderful post and I highly recommend reading, bookmarking, re-reading, and implementing it if it sounds like something that would work for you.) One of the points she makes is about staying true to your intent and not letting your ego run the show. I’ve let my ego tell me what to do many, many times. It’s hard to make it to go sit in a corner and let you do your thing.

I set a few goals before a recent assignment that I wanted to achieve for the magazine and for myself. I allowed plenty of time during the shoot to think through my goals, be inventive, and visualize the photographs before I took them. I pictured the photos in the pages of the magazine that hired me and in other magazines I want to shoot for, all the while keeping my vision focused.

My ego kept sneaking up behind me, though, whispering things in my head like “too bad your lenses aren’t good enough for a low-light room like this” and “there’s nothing good to shoot here anyways, just chalk it up and move on” and “what must these people think of you.” I kept pushing my ego away and refocusing on my assignment and goals. My ego would come back and I’d fight it off again, making for a shoot filled with highs and lows confidence-wise. After I was finished and on my way back to the office my ego chimed in one more time telling me “oh well, let’s hope there’s one or two shots in there that will work.”

A day or two later, as I browsed through the photos from the shoot, I saw the struggle between my ego and my vision right before my eyes. Some images were clearly ego driven, forced, off the mark, and lacking confidence.

However, the images made and driven by my vision, my intent, were absolutely wonderful (see photos above). And there were a lot more of those absolutely wonderful, goal-driven, and intentional photographs, too.