Being creative and colouring outside of the lines can be rather confusing if you've been perfectionistic for as long as I have. I only really started discovering myself from around the age of 23. Since then I have always had daydreams about certain things that I could see myself do - dreams I've not dreamt before. One such dream was of me doing photography. I felt a strange comfort with the idea of holding a camera - it felt so natural, but a nice camera was just a fantasy to me, something I could not afford.
Around two years ago I fell in love with guy who was really "into" photography and even though it was just a hobby he had some really nice photographic equipment. One weekend in a gorgeous bushveld setting of Limpopo, South Africa, he was so gracious to let me try my hand at it, using one of his cameras. From the moment I held it in my hand I thought to myself, Just the way I had always imagined it!
Sadly the relationship didn't last but my affair with photography did! Thank you to my friend who opened my eyes (and my heart) to the possibilities of dreams becoming a reality!
At first my perfectionistic "twin" wouldn't let me cut off any part of an image, nagging at me that it would make the photograph "imperfect" somehow, ruined for life. It took me one afternoon in the gallery of a National Geographic photographer to realize that sometimes cutting something - or a piece of something - off can make it art! Thank you, Jim Richardson, for teaching me that it is OK to 'colour outside the lines'!
