A Photographer’s Note on Calm

I read something this week from Mary Spender, a musician about insecurity and it made me think a bit. Not because it was particularly gloomy, more because it felt… familiar.

Photography has its own version of it, doesn’t it?

Most of us don’t walk into a room thinking, “I hope everyone likes me.” But we do walk in scanning for signals. Are they relaxed around me? Are they watching me? Am I in the way? Am I missing something? Then you take a photo, show a client a preview perhaps, and suddenly that word “nice” can feel louder than it should. It’s never just about the picture. It’s about what the picture seems to say about you.

And that’s the part I recognise. Photography is one of those crafts where the thing you make can start to feel like evidence of who you are. If the work is good, you feel great. If it doesn’t, it can feel personal in a way that’s hard to explain to people outside it.

You can be experienced, even successful, and still have that little voice going, “Yeah, but are you actually any good?”. I get this all the time.

I used to think insecurity was useful. Honestly, maybe it is at first. It makes you practise. It makes you pay attention. It keeps you from getting lazy.

I’ve definitely done good work off the back of a fear that I wasn’t quite there yet.

At some point, insecurity stops being bad energy and becomes a real problem. It doesn’t improve the work; it gets in the way of it.

It shows up in small ways. Overshooting moments because you don’t trust yourself to have got it. Over-editing because you’re trying to make the photo bulletproof. Second-guessing a simple decision because you’ve seen someone else do it differently on Instagram.

Even explaining yourself too much, like you need to justify your choices before anyone even questions them.

And social media pours fuel on all of it. Metrics, comments, the constant background hum of comparison. It’s not that feedback is bad; it’s that it’s relentless and it’s rarely the full story.

You see numbers and reactions, not the moments where your work actually matters to someone. It’s a bit like what’s happening with AI search and summaries, too. Everything gets compressed into quick signals, and it trains you to chase signals instead of doing the craft properly. I’ve been guilty of that.

So what’s the fix? I don’t think it’s “be confident”. That’s useless advice. I think it’s more like demoting insecurity. Let it exist, but don’t let it be in charge.

Calm photographers aren’t the ones with no nerves. They’re the ones who don’t stress about those nerves. They notice the alarm bells, then they carry on anyway. They stop performing and start paying attention.

They shoot from curiosity, not from trying to prove themselves.

That’s what I aim for now. Less looking for approval. More grounded in my work.

Not the loudest person in the room, not the most impressive, just, well, me.

If insecurity started the engine, fine. But it doesn’t get to decide where I’m going next.