Imposter Syndrome? Moi? - and Episode 82 of Understanding Photography with Kim Ayres

"I'll be glad when it's all over!"

"You'll be great," I said. "You've done this kind of thing loads of times before. Once you're up there in front of everyone, you'll be panicking for a few moments and you will fall into 'mode' and that part of you will take over, and you'll be fine."

"I don't know why I even signed up to this..."

"Because at the planning stage it sounded brilliant, and afterwards you'll look back with a sense of achievement. It's just the bit in between that's crap and full of overwhelming feelings of Imposter Syndrome," I said.

"Well that's very true, but I doubt it's something you experience." It was said more as a statement than a question.

"Of course I do. All the time."

"What? You? No way!"

"Why do you think I understand exactly what you're going through?" I said.

(a more or less word for word conversation I had last week)

Imposter Syndrome is the overwhelming sense that everyone else knows what they're doing but you're out of your depth, and at any moment someone's going to notice, catch you out, and reveal you are not as good as anyone thought you were.

Utter humiliation is only a hair's breadth away.

If this sounds familiar, then it just means you're not a psychopath, and have a certain degree of self awareness.

It is something pretty much everyone experiences from time to time, and some people experience on a daily basis.

Creatives – artists, makers, writers, actors, models, presenters, the self-employed – in fact anyone who has to at some point put themselves in front of other people where they might be judged - more or less live with this feeling constantly.

And most people think they are the only one experiencing it.

For the most part it comes out of the fact that we only ever see other people's final, polished, creation, whereas we are very aware of all the stuff that's gone wrong before we were able to submit ours.

I'll do a photo shoot where we need 6 edited images for publication or promotion.

I'll take 400.

By the time I have whittled it down to the best 15 to choose from, I've had to get rid of 385 photos that weren't up to the mark.

And some of them were downright awful.

On the first sweep I'm having to delete all the ones that were out of focus, where the subject was blinking, where the camera settings were wrong, where the equipment failed, where I clicked too early or too late.

On the second sweep, I'm having to get rid of all the ones that were technically fine, but the composition was boring, jarring, or giving the wrong message.

And even the selected finalists will have to be edited and polished up – they are not quite good enough as they happened in the camera – they can always be improved by lightening a bit here, darkening a bit there, cropping that bit out, subtly colour adjusting this bit, or even removing that section entirely and pasting a different one in from another photo.

So if someone looks at one of my final, published images and remarks that I'm a great photographer, all I can think is, "Yeah, right – you might think that, but you have no idea that the vast majority of my photos are shite, and this time I just managed to get lucky and was able to rescue some and polish them up to make them look better than they were."

Of course no one wants to hear that – especially clients who you've just charged a wodge of money to. So instead you say, "That's really kind, thank you!"

There has never been a single photo shoot I've gone to where – as I'm putting on my shoes and coat ready to leave - I haven't been overwhelmed with fear that this time is going to be the one where I am going to fail utterly, be shown up as an incompetent photographer who has just been lucky in the past, and is now going to experience total humiliation.

Every time, my wife tries to reassure me that I always feel like this, and that once I'm there I will fall into "mode" and be fine.

Every time I think it's easy for her to say that, but this could well be the time when I'm finally going to be revealed as not being good enough.

So far though, no one has caught me out... yet...

Meanwhile, enjoy Episode 82 where we review the images submitted to the Halloween Photo Challenge I set last week.

And if you decide to click through and view it directly on YouTube (rather than here on the blog), then you can watch the Live Chat Replay and see the comments people are writing in real time as the podcast progresses.

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2:03 - Welcome, what's coming up, greetings and comments
6:20 - Megan - day of the dead face painting
13:18 - Rose-Marie - silhoutted trees and birds
15:48 - when cropping limbs, don't crop at the joints...
18:09 - Jack - light painting
21:39 - Innes - zombie nun composite
30:28 - Robert - cemetary
33:28 - making sure a submitted photo is on theme
36:57 - Viji - Mahalaya Paksha
42:45 - Roy - fun run, and emerging from the grave
47:15 - Mac - 5 pic composite
50:00 - Jim - pumpkin floral display
54:13 - Nicola - scissorhands
58:58 - Garry - muslin and a Venetian mask
1:03:12 - Coming up next week - Photographing books, and Critique
1:06:30 - End

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