Underexposed and Desaturated

You have to go backwards to move forward

This week I’ve been going backwards. I’ve known for a while that I want to improve my video making and editing skills, particularly in regards to exposure and colour, but have been held back by comfort in my old routine and the knowing that in order to move forward, I will first have to go a step or few back.

This feels pretty daunting when already in the swing of a creative journey, it is far too easy to blindly push on without truly asking if you are achieving your goals, and it is hard to acknowledge that what is within your comfort zone is no longer cutting it.

It feels so important to face up to this, to take an objective look at where you are and how far you have come, in the context of where you are trying to go. For me this meant acknowledging and celebrating how much I have achieved and learned since I started making videos, but also recognising that to keep improving, I need to keep moving into a place of discomfort and challenge.

At the time when I made my oldest videos, I thought they looked good- or even great, because I didn’t know any better. I had limited skills, all newly learned and I did the best I could with them. I knew at that time that just getting something done was the most important goal. Now that I compare them to later videos, it seems so obvious what needed work - but seeing that now is the privilege of greater knowledge and experience, and I could never have gained that without the process of learning that came in between.

This got me thinking about the sacrifice we have to make to learn something new, or to take skills to the next level. You may have a way of doing things, and it may feel comfortable, and is likely efficient, because you are well used to it. It takes less time, less energy, less emotion to execute because you have done so much of that work already, during the initial learning process, and now you reap the benefits of habit and familiar neural paths. But over time, you become aware that your ambitions are outstripping you abilities, that the skills you make most use of are no longer enough to satisfy the vision you have. This is the feeling I have had recently, and I eventually accepted that I would have to go through the discomfort of growth. It even feels like a metaphor for personal development in daily life. Staying in the safe familiar place is always the easy choice, but if you are someone who really craves self expression and wants to fulfil their potential, this is not an option.

So I took a couple of steps back, knowing that I would have to sacrifice my familiar workflow, my comfort with certain processes and skills, and leap into uncertainty and the loss of control that comes with learning something new. This kind of thing is not hard when you are young, or a child. You don’t know much, you don’t have much to lose, everything is disorientating in this way, but also magical and exciting. As you get older, and accrue more skills, more knowledge, more complacency, more arrogance, you are at great risk of becoming stagnant. This is why I think learning new things is always healthy. At any age or stage of development, it is so healthy to be a beginner, to know nothing, to be yet to discover, to defer to someone wiser. It keeps us humble but also sustains our sense of wonder at the world, reminds us that there is always more to discover, more joys as yet unexperienced.

I changed the settings on my camera. I read up on ‘frames per second’, f-stops, LOG footage. I deleted iMovie from my computer and downloaded DaVinci Resolve, a more complex video editing software that allows for colour correction and colour grading. Editing was slow, at times frustrating, at one point I deleted my timeline and panicked that I wouldn’t get it back. The colour graded footage didn’t look as good as I had hoped. My new video turned out underexposed and desaturated.

It would be easy to feel disappointed, to tell myself that this is not better, I am wasting my time, and use this voice of my discomfort as an excuse to revert to my old methods. Retreating to the safety of my previous shell and distracting myself from dreams of greater things. But I am now old enough to know that this is not the answer. I have committed myself to a creative life and know that this means constant challenge, periods of discomfort, and occasional feelings of self doubt. I am aware that this is an essential part of the process of learning, growing and reaching my potential, and I have the self belief to push through this bumpy phase. I know that I will look back in time and see how much improvement I made as a result of this effort.

Here is the video:

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Thank you for reading my first Substack post! If you have any thoughts please leave a comment, and subscribe for future posts if you found this interesting.

Thanks again for the support,

Katherine