Improve Your Photography by Leaving Your Comfort Zone.

The comfort zone :)

Maybe you’ve heard about necessity to leave your comfort zone. Leaving the comfort zone means doing something you are not comfortable with.
And what is the comfort zone?
The comfort zone is a psychological state in which a person feels familiar, at ease, in control, and experiences low anxiety. A person in this state uses a limited set of behaviors to deliver a steady level of performance, usually without a sense of risk.
The comfort zone is neither a good or bad thing. It's a natural state for humans because we need place where we feel a sense of emotional security and a low anxiety, where we know what's coming next and can plan accordingly.

There's nothing wrong with being in your comfort zone, unless you start holding yourself back instead of challenging yourself to learn something new.

Outside the comfort zone there’s the unknown territory. To leave the comfort zone means to increase risk and anxiety, means to stop using “an autopilot mode”.
But most people enjoy the security of daily life and are afraid of failure. 
Meanwhile sometimes failure is just the first step towards success. There are many famous, known around the world people who failed before success. Among them are business gurus Henry Ford and Bill Gates, great scientists Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, great inventor Thomas Edison, famous writers Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. These people didn't let their setbacks stop them from pursuing their goals.
(Though not giving up sometimes can’t help you, but giving up means a complete failure).

Most people try to avoid risk and the unknown.
But as the globally celebrated author Robin S. Sharma wrote:

“As you move outside of your comfort zone, what was once the unknown and frightening becomes your new normal.”

If you are a photographer you have your comfort zone in the photography. For example a landscape photographer is most comfortable with one light source, the sun; he/she has never staged photos or manipulated the light (as a rule).
Nobody wants to make bad photos of something he/she didn’t photograph. However it will be useful to a photographer to step outside the comfort zone and photograph subjects he/she doesn’t familiar with. Photographing subjects outside of the comfort zone will make a photographer a better photographer in general.

For example if you are a landscape photographer you can start with baby steps when it comes to stepping outside your comfort zone by simply including humans into your landscape photos. The next steps could be photographing architecture, still life and portraiture.

You will find that the more you get out of your comfort zone the more opportunities you will find both in your professional and personal life.

“The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity; moving beyond it necessitates intuition, which in turn configures new perspectives and conquers fears.” (Dan Stevens)

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Thank you for reading!

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