Objective: stop chasing perfect images and just shoot your heart out.

We all know it...that image that stops you cold when you're downloading them or staring at the back of your camera.  It's perfect!  Problem is, it isn't easy to get and it doesn't reliably happen and you can't always predict it.  My friend, Danny, always says "It's a camera, not a magic wand".  Repeat this to yourself over and over...

So what do you do when you abandon the notion of making perfect images?  You can absolutely practice, study, read and focus on making your images better every day.  That is what I am trying to do.  When you let go of perfect, you will be happier shooting, you'll shoot more and you will get better every day.  When I first learned about photography it was all film based.  My teacher used to say, "film is cheap, shoot as much as you can".  Now with digital cameras shooting more is even less than cheap, it's FREE!

If you get stuck on what to shoot, give yourself assignments.  I've run across a lot of blogs where people are doing just that.  I've seen a picture a day experiments or 30 days of pictures and so on.  I knew someone back in art school who took a self portrait each day.   How about this for inspiration- Here's a Flickr gallery of self portraits called 365 days.

I need time lines, deadlines and projects.  If I just have a loose idea of what I want to do it gets pushed aside or procrastinated to a "better" day or time.  Don't procrastinate, start today.

When you photograph kids like I do, perfection is nearly impossible to achieve.  It does happen though.  Everything lines up and all the kids look the right way and the light is perfect and it's magical.  Often, in the search for perfect you get something better, something imperfect, honest and real.  In many ways that is much more perfect than the perfect pose or smile.

Your mission from today forward is to let go of preconceived pictures and ideas of the perfect shot.  Grab your camera and go take great, imperfect shots.  Here's one for inspiration.