Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Category: Fear

Just Taking Pictures
I need to get back to the simple joy of taking pictures. Just having fun and exploring creatively. No pressure.
Pressure
Taking pictures used to be fun. Now, it seems I worry too much about whether it is a great picture, a portfolio image, does it further a project I am working on?
That puts a lot of pressure on me.
I seem to get caught up in feeling like the images are “important” and that, somehow, I am being judged by the quality of every one I take. When I got to the point that I could occasionally take a pretty good picture, then somehow, an attitude developed that all of them need to be excellent. That if most of them weren’t “winners”, then I must be losing my edge, backsliding. The artistic muse must be gone.
This is silly when you think of it. After all, I would never show you most of my photos. The mediocre ones (hopefully) get culled out. But there is a natural reaction that some of us have that leads to a fear of failure. At some point we are afraid, or at least discouraged, to do more work for fear that it will not be as good as what we did in the past.
I can understand this. It happens to me, but I am trying hard to not accept it. At the minimum, it leads to my photography becoming work, a chore instead of fun. That pressure to always exceed my best can suck the joy out of my art.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Who is it for?
I need to keep reminding myself who the real audience is. Who is your audience? I sometimes forget.
If you must produce a high-quality image from a shoot for a client contract, you are clear who the audience is. And you have the pressure of having to create to client demands. That is a clear pressure situation that you have willingly accepted by signing the contract.
Or if you feel pressure to post daily shots that will get “likes” from your internet viewers, that is another clear pressure situation that you have bought into. You have pressure to shoot for your viewer’s tastes rather than your own.
Those generally do not apply to me, though. I may occasionally shoot for someone, and I occasionally post images to the internet, like in these articles. But in almost all cases, I am the audience that matters. That is what I must keep in mind.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Inhibition
There must be a “so what” here. If I lose sight of who I am shooting for, what are the consequences?
The consequence to me is the pressure that builds to always exceed the best of what I have done. A result of this is that I shut down. I feel inhibited from taking any pictures. I look at something that seems interesting and think “yes, but I may not be able to make an outstanding picture from that.” So, I don’t shoot. I don’t take the chance.
I find that when I get stuck in this self-imposed pressure trap, I lose my will to take pictures. Nothing seems worthwhile. I don’t feel “inspired.” I have come to understand that much of this is really inhibition caused by fear of not living up to my past performance, combined with fear of moving away from what has worked in the past.
If I only shoot “safe” scenes, this leads me to becoming less creative with time. Stagnating. I’m boxing myself in. Creativity inspires taking chances, doing things that probably will not make a great picture, but may answer a question or lead to something new. But this is the messy way new ideas and approaches are discovered. It is risk taking and exploration.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Inspiration
When you’re low and feeling uninspired, what do you do? All the artists through time have experienced this, I’m sure there must be a variety of strategies. There are 2 I have worked out that are usually effective for me.
One, probably the big one, is to get up and do something. If I sit around feeling sorry for myself and waiting to be inspired, I will probably be there a long time doing nothing. I need to make myself do something, even if it is just throwaway stuff. There is a lot of inertia to overcome, but eventually I get moving. And things get better and I feel creativity returning.
The most recent session of this (working on it now), I attacked the problem on my computer rather than by forcing myself to shoot more. I enjoy doing weird, abstract composites. So, I made myself sit down with my Lightroom catalog and do some. I would scroll through and pick out something that looks interesting as a base image and throw it into Photoshop. Then I would scroll some more until I find another image that I feel might combine in an interesting way with the other one. I take it into Photoshop and start working with them together.
I might poke away at them a while and delete the result. Or it might lead to something that intrigues me. That may serve as a base to bring in other elements and textures to make it richer and more complex. This has moved quickly from something I made myself do to something I’m having fun with. Doing this energizes me and I find my new image shooting has picked up.
The second mental kickstarter I use is to take a trip. A change of scenery works wonders to shake me out of lethargy. This strategy is usually effective, but more expensive. I don’t do it as often as I would like.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Take pictures
When I get trapped in one of these down cycles, I find the solution is to do something. Take pictures. Do something. Don’t worry about the results. Try something new. Tell yourself that you are experimenting, and the results are not expected to be great. Give yourself permission to work without pressure.
The muse – however you visualize inspiration – seems to only be there when we are working.
Excited
Being an introvert, I’m not very demonstrative. Unless you know me well, it may not be apparent to you when I’m excited. But I know. When I’m caught up in a project or exploring new techniques or ideas, I’m excited. My mind is not just engaged, it is spinning, sparking, generating new ideas constantly. It is a great feeling, and it seems like I can’t do bad work while I’m riding this wave.
But the issue is how to get back into this zone when we are parked on the bench, out of the game? I can’t give you a foolproof formula. Sorry
What I can recommend is that action always seems to help. Force yourself to pick up your camera and go out and shoot something. Don’t worry that they are not going to be your best images. Just shoot. Throw them away if necessary. But get moving in the right direction.
I talked about how creating composites is helping get me going. Taking a trip to a new location is usually effective. Other ideas are to study a new artist’s work (Rocky Nook has a lot of good books by artists), go to a good art museum, or visit some galleries. Even reading an inspiring book can help. Whatever works for you to stimulate your curiosity, spark ideas, motivate you to do something.
When we are moving and working, fear and inhibitions fall away. We are no longer held back by uncertainty, and we aren’t focused on what we did in the past. We are moving forward doing exciting new work. Do your work to please your #1 audience – you.
I’m trying to keep in mind the joy of just taking pictures. I hope you do, too.
Get moving. Go shoot something. It doesn’t matter what it is or what pictures you get. Start something and ride the wave.
July 29, 2026
Risk
Risk is a part of anything we do. Especially if we are an artist. We constantly try new things that may not work. In creative work we often do not clearly know where we are going. That leads to a lot of failed experiments and dead ends. When we try and fail, is that bad? Is the risk worth it?
Risk
I suspect none of us like to think much about risk taking and failure. But we’re artists. We have to be big boys and girls. Art is risk. We will fail in many of the things we try. Is that a reason not to do it?
Author Herman Melville once said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” I believe the greater risk in our artistic life is to fail to be creative.
AI is constantly learning how to mimic all existing art. The only solution is to be different from what exists, including our own past work. Not different for the sake of being different, but fresh, new creativity.
If we are repeating the same boring stuff that 99% of photographers do, what have we contributed to art or to ourselves? Chasing likes on social media is normalizing. That is, it brings us down to the average level of everyone else.
Theodore Roosevelt said: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.” If we are an artist, the risk is to not give it our full effort and not become what we can be. To let what is within us die because of fear of failure. That seems too great a fate to risk.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Attitude
Our attitude about failure will have a lot to do with our results. A reality for many of us is that, if we are not failing, we are not stretching ourselves and developing new skills or vision. As creatives we cannot play it safe. We must be risk takers.
I love a quote from a blog by Benjamin Hardy. He was talking about Molly Bloom who said “The moment you realize you can try and fail — and that everything will be okay — then you are free to create.“
This is a liberating event in our creative journey. Failure isn’t final. It is not even necessarily bad. Failure leads to growth. When you fail, no one comes and takes away your camera or your brushes. No one (who counts) even laughs at us. Realizing we can fail and go on with no consequences frees us to try without worrying much about failing.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Learn by doing
We don’t upgrade our skills and exercise our creativity just by thinking about it. We must take action. There is no way to decide if the result is good until we see the result. But just taking random action will usually lead to random, unwanted results. We need a way to follow a path that will take us to desired results.
You are probably familiar with the “do it, try it, fix it” loop. It goes by different names, but the concept is the same. This is an excellent process for improving things.
The basic idea is you try something new. Then you evaluate the results, Was it a success or an improvement? Decide what, if anything, you want to keep of this experiment to incorporate into your tool set. Then, based on the evaluation, plan what to try next. That becomes the basis of the next experiment. It is important to realize this is a cycle, meaning it continually loops and repeats. It is a proven process of directed experiments leading to growth.
Evaluate
At the evaluation stage many experiments will be tossed out. They did not take us in the direction we want to go. It was a failure, but that does not mean we failed. We just tried something that we decided didn’t work for us.
This is part of a process. It is a deliberate plan to systematically push the limits. To do that, we will try a lot of things that don’t work out satisfactorily. The failures are expected, planned even. Not something to be ashamed of. We should be happy to know we tried. Now we are free to do another experiment in a different direction.
Please understand that a consequence of this is that we must be prepared to deliberately reject much of our work. We must have a standard to evaluate against that allows us to separate acceptable from unacceptable. Don’t be afraid to call some of our effort unacceptable. And do not be discouraged.
It is kind of like the story of Edison inventing the light bulb. He found 10,000 things that didn’t work. They weren’t failures, they were insights.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Freedom
Freedom is at the core of the process. We are not just trying random things and mostly being disappointed with the results and insecure with our creativity. Instead, we are following a deliberate process of improving our self and our art. Knowing we can try anything with no fear of failure is extremely liberating. It is part of the self-confidence we must have as artists.
It is easy to get discouraged and think of our self as the failure. We have probably all felt like a fraud who has no right considering themself an artist. Remind yourself that we have to change and grow creatively, and to do that requires a lot of risk taking and failed experiments. Following a process like outlined above makes it a methodical plan. It helps us keep in mind that the failure is not a personal failing but a necessary and expected outcome of the growth process. It can be exciting. We can risk more when the fails are not catastrophic.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
No fault
There is a tendency in our culture to want things to be “no fault”. It seems shameful and damaging to our fragile self-esteem to be at fault for something. So, we have no fault insurance, no fault divorces, etc. It is a reluctance to take blame for something that didn’t work.
I’m suggesting that when we take risk with our art, and the result is a failure, we are responsible for the failure. It is our art. We made the creative decisions that led to the outcome we didn’t like, or we were not skilled enough in our craft to pull it off. No one else did it. Accept that as a growth opportunity.
I made the point that our artistic failure is not a personal failure. I strongly believe that is true. An artistic failure does not have blame or shame. We had an idea to do something creative. We took a risk. It didn’t work out the way we anticipated. That is OK. A failed experiment does not make us a failed artist or a bad person. The benefit is that it informs our future efforts. It creates a steppingstone forward. It is a healthy risk.
If you always succeed, you’re not trying hard enough.
Woody Allen
April 22, 2026
Post Exploration
We focus a lot on the process of taking pictures. And rightly. But the world of post processing is another rich opportunity for “making” images.
Taking pictures
When we think about photography, we think about taking pictures. After all, that is what photography is, isn’t it? That is where we capture the data that becomes the final image. For many, the thinking stops there. Click – picture.
Maybe crop it a little or remove a distraction. Perhaps work on the overall color. But the picture is the picture. No reason to make many changes.
Many people, especially some “serious” photographers, feel that the image should be made whole and complete in the camera. Anything other than simple edits that make no substantive changes to the original image is suspect or forbidden. That is their opinion, and they are welcome to it, so long as they do not try to bind it on me.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Post processing
But for other photographers, the world of post processing is much larger than that. Yes, there is cropping and distraction removal and some color tweaks, but those are just the basic first steps.
I will go out on a limb and say that post processing is as large and important a skill as is capturing images. The world of digital imaging has thrown us into a situation where what happens after the shutter press can be as important as what happens leading up to it. And our tools have become far more powerful, enabling “darkroom” processing far beyond what any film shooter ever dreamed of. It would be foolish not to take advantage of it.
I assume you shoot RAW images. There are times to shoot jpg, but those are rare in my world of fine art photography. But RAW images require extensive editing. They look bland right out of the camera, since they did not go through heavy-handed jpg processing that is trying to make a best guess of what we wanted.
Just enhancing
After that initial round of basic edits, we get more serious for the images we pull out to work up. Now we probably do some initial sharpening. Then set overall contrast, black & white points, maybe some clarity to punch it up some more.
At this point the image is starting to take shape. Now I may spend a lot of time working on tonal gradations. Working on the details of lighting and separating element so they can be seen more clearly. Then there is working on global saturation and luminance and maybe even hue of individual colors.
We may decide to add a vignette to help focus attention on the subject. Perhaps we will use color grading or profiles to change the overall “look” of the image. Maybe so far as going to black & white.
There are so many more. This is just the tip of the iceberg. We can easily spend hours on one image doing these and many more. I have watched hundreds of hours of tutorial videos describing techniques for doing these things. Really getting in depth on Lightroom Classic or, especially, Photoshop is a project requiring years. And they are moving targets.
But at this point, we have a nicely corrected image – that is still basically the original photograph. It may be exactly the scene as we remember it, or it may have a color wash, or even be in black & white, but it is the same photograph.
Again, this is where another large group of photographers stop.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Permission to play
And that’s where I stop with most of my images. But there are other doors to open that can lead to new destinations.
Here is a statement of belief for me: pixels are raw material. They are just pieces of data saved on your computer. They do not “mean” anything except for the meaning we ascribe to them when we view them all together as an image. This is my belief. but since it is not based on laws or regulations or fundamentals of nature, it is just my belief. Feel free to disagree and act accordingly.
But since this is my belief, I am free to do anything I want with my data. There is nothing like PETA for protecting against the abuse of pixels.
I give myself unlimited permission to play with my data. And I do, to degrees. The problem is that it is hard to break away from old habits and beliefs. Too often, I am trapped by my limited thinking. I see an image. I don’t always see what those pixels could become. That, more than camera resolution or tools or computer power, limits what I make.
Permission to play does not mean I will always take advantage of my freedom. I am self-limited. My actions don’t always follow my beliefs. But I’m trying to break my mental barriers.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Making new images
I love compositing, combining 2 or more images to make something new. It is a joy when I can take 2 dissimilar images and make something different from either. Sometimes I put together 3,4, 10 images. The resulting image may only have bits and pieces of each source file. Did you know that a TIFF file has a maximum size of 4G Bytes? After that you must bump up to the PSB format. Quite a few of my experimental images do that.
And I love taking an image and processing it with different textures or digital effects to create a very different look. So much so that sometimes when I am out shooting, I mainly shoot textures. I have a good library of them.
And have you played with some of the interesting Photoshop filters that are built in? Quite a variety of tools for blur, rendering, warp, landscape mixer, distort, stylize, etc. I can experiment for hours in Photoshop trying new combinations of things.
Some actually create results I like. But you never know until you try.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
The digital world
My point is that our “photo opportunities” do not stop when we press the shutter. Capturing a good image is very important. But there are endless possibilities for improving it or totally changing it in post processing. Sometimes we see opportunities for doing more than just making an image look better. Post processing is another creative outlet.
Digital images are much more malleable than film. Pixels are just data. Data can be processed. There is a world of opportunity in the post processing, if we can break out of our limited view of what can and should be done to our pixels. I call it post exploration.
If you are a fine art photographer, the ethical choice is to do your best, most creative work. Not to protect pixels.
October 29, 2025
That Didn’t Work
You had an idea. You tried for it, but the result must be considered a failure. If that didn’t work, what do you do? Does that mean you are a bad artist?
An idea
You get an idea of something you want to try. Call it an inspiration if you will. More likely it is an extension of what you have done before, maybe applied to a new subject or situation.
As an artist, most of our work begins with an idea. As a photographer, we than follow up the idea with trying to realize it as an image. Maybe several, working different positions, lenses, shutter speeds, etc. to try to optimize the resultant image.
If you are very experienced with your craft, you might be able to visualize fairly accurately what the result will be. But no matter how experienced you are, you will get surprises. Surprises can be fun and a great creativity boost.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Fail
But whether you blast away 100 frames or selectively shoot 1 frame of a scene, you will sometimes look at the result and say it was a fail. How we react to such a failure is very important. Your reaction could ultimately determine the level of success you have later.
I’m using the idea of failing, but what does that mean? The definition will be different for each of us, but in general, I hope we can agree that it means the result does not meet our expectation. It does not necessarily mean the image is terrible or unusable, or even bad, but what we planned or pre-visualized did not happen.
At the risk of sounding like a cliché, this is a learning opportunity.©Ed Schlotzhauer
Permission to fail
Failure seems like a terrible fault to some of us. I am one of those in many things, but not in my photography. For my art, I have given myself not only permission to “fail”, but the expectation that I will and should. I have embraced failure as a healthy part of growing as an artist.
This was a big step for me. I discovered that the fact of failure was not the main problem. The larger problem was fear of failure.
How much are we held back in our art by fear of failure? Do we fear being humiliated? Or that people will dismiss us as an untalented lightweight? Do we believe we are somehow bad when a shot does not meet our expectation?
Here’s the reality: few people care about what we do. They are not sitting around thinking about us and they take little or no notice of our work. If they’re not fixated on it, why should we be?
We are our main audience. Our work succeeds or fails based on our own perception. All that matters is whether we get to a result we are happy with. Failures along the way should not matter.
Risk
Author Herman Melville once said, “It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.” I believe the greater risk in our artistic life is to fail to be creative.
AI is constantly learning how to mimic all existing art. The only solution is to be different from what exists.
If we are repeating the same boring stuff that 99% of photographers do, what have we contributed to art or to ourselves? Chasing likes on social media is normalizing. That is, it brings us down to the average level of everyone else.
Theodore Roosevelt said: “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. In this life we get nothing save by effort.” If we are an artist, the risk is to not give it our full effort and not become what we can be. To let what is within us die because of fear of failure. That seems too great a fate to risk.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Learn, modify, try again
The sports legend Michael Jordan said “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.“
Unlike Michael Jordan, we don’t have millions of fans watching live as we fail. We can curate our work and select what gets presented to people to see. You won’t see my failures, unless I am trying to make a point.
Given that, why should we consider failure a problem? A failure is an experiment. We try something, we see the result, and we like it, or we don’t. Either way we can learn something new and try again. But the reality is, we learn more from failing than from success. But only if we make the effort to figure out the cause.
So, when we’re shooting, we have an idea or a vision of what we want to achieve. We make the image. Later, we examine it closely on our computer. Sometimes the result is far from what we envisioned. That is a time to introspect. To determine what we did or didn’t do that made the result different from what we wanted. Maybe to ask if the result is better or worse than what we visualized.
These days, I find that less of my fails are because of exposure or composition problems. Most are concept-level issues. Ansel Adams said “There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Concept failures are harder to diagnose and correct, but they certainly keep me thinking more.
But whatever the cause of our failure, our goal should be to learn, modify, and try again.
Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
Sketches
I consider most of my images to be sketches. Things that are helping me work toward an idea I haven’t fully envisioned. When I shot film, these experiments were expensive, and I tried to minimize the loss. Digital frames seem almost free. No problem to take several experimental tries.
So now we should be free to work a scene as much as seems valuable. But I seldom do it that way. My sketches are more tests to see if what I saw can become a good image. Perhaps it is a fault of mine, but I spend little effort making many slight variations of a scene.
I don’t like doing comparison tests of 12 different views of a scene to try to figure out which is best. If I come up with 4 that are equally good, how do I decide a “best”? When I find myself in this situation, I often conclude I am not really applying much creativity to the image. I seem to be optimizing for technical concerns.
A possible exception is shooting intentional camera motion (ICM) images. Each frame could be considered a failure from a purist technical perspective – blurry, motion, no sharp subject. These are fun because it is an abstraction technique, and each frame is unique. For these, I may do a few variations on a scene, trying different motion techniques. You never know exactly what the outcome will be. There are occasional happy surprises.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Discoveries
When we allow ourselves permission to fail, we sometimes discover that we have stumbled onto something entirely new. We see a glimpse of a new creative statement starting to form.
This is a different form of courage in the face of failure. The recognition that yes, we failed in what we tried, but it opened a new insight on our world. The first emergence of this new idea is probably crude. It seems like a failure. But as we reflect on why we are drawn to it, why we do not immediately delete it, it may give new insight to change our viewpoint and try to perfect it.
This is one of those rare and exciting moments when we get a tingling in our spine and we perk up and wonder what just happened here? That is a cue that we are about to step outside our comfort zone. It is dangerous for an artist to be too comfortable for too long.
That is creativity. Sometimes creativity is based on recognizing that what I did didn’t work, but I now see a glimpse of something better. Being an artist is a process, not a destination. Failure can be an opportunity to advance ourselves to a better state. Analyze it, experiment, modify, try again to see if you are going in a good direction.
Sometimes, finding “that didn’t work” could mean we are on the brink of an exciting new step in our art.
August 20, 2025
Permission to Be an Artist
There is only one thing stopping us from being an artist. We need to give ourselves permission to call ourself an artist. No one else has the authority to do it.
Who regulates “art”?
Who regulates art? Maybe that seems like a silly question, but many of us are hesitant to call ourselves an artist because we have not been officially designated one by some standards board. We haven’t received our certificate.
I don’t know if it is good or bad, but that standards board does not exist. The certificate does not exist, and if it did, it would be meaningless.
Many people and organizations want us to think they are the keepers of the purity of the arts. But they only have authority as far as they can convince other people they have it.
The gatekeepers, whether they are large galleries, or internet influencers, or art schools, or even your local camera club, have no authority to control what is art and who gets to do it.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Who is keeping you from being an artist?
I believe many of us are afraid to consider ourselves an artist for fear that someone will come and say no, we are not qualified. We are afraid we would be publicly humiliated and denounced as not good enough. We did not pass the qualifications. By calling ourselves an artist, we might fear we are elevating ourself to a higher plateau.
Well, we are. But that is a good thing.
This is art, not brain surgery. We do not have to go to school for 12 years then do years of apprenticeship before going before a review board to grant us a license. I’m glad they train doctors like that, but it is not a good model for artists.
The best definition I can remember of art is that anything done as art, is art. So, if you intended that image to be art rather than just a selfie or record shot, then it is art. No one can say it is not.
That no way says that if you intended it to be art then it is great art. Its quality depends on many factors, including your skill and maturity. We learn and improve all our life.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Photographer or artist?
So, when someone asks you what you do, what is your answer? Are you an artist, or a photographer, or do you respond with something vague like, “oh, I like to take pictures”? How you answer and view yourself is your business. But what is keeping you from considering yourself an artist?
I recognize that if we announce ourselves as an artist, we are claiming greater mastery. We present our work and ourselves in a different light. In a different way. Those of us who are introverts get nervous about that. We do not seek attention,
The reality, as I see it, is that it is not about ego or skill level. If we believe we are doing art, we should confidently assert to the world around us that we are artists.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
Prove it
Some people are born salesmen. They try to talk the talk without learning how to walk the walk. I do not think that is the case for you who read this. You understand that you must prove what you can do, who you are as an artist. And that is what we do with every image we show the world. It is just as important, if not more important, to prove it to ourselves.
How do we do that?
John Paul Caponigro said “Singular images prove your craft. A body of work proves your artistry.” I think there is wisdom in that.
When you go through your catalog critically, do you find images you would show anyone, anywhere without fear of ridicule? If you find a few, great. You are learning the craft and starting to produce interesting work.
Have you, or can you, put together one or more projects around a theme? A good project would have 10-20 excellent images showing cohesiveness and consistency. This demonstrates your ability to create a body of work.
A single great image may be luck. A good body of work proves you can repeat it. That you are can create regularly and to a consistently high level of quality.
This is certainly not the only way to prove your mastery, but it is a good way. Give it a try and you might surprise yourself.
If you have proved to yourself that you are an artist, do not be afraid to take the label for yourself. Say it proudly. You have given yourself permission. You are the only one who matters.
July 23, 2025