I get a number of very different reactions to what I have chosen to name my pseudo company, “Full Potential Photography”, the most common being that it’s too long. Every time I think of changing it or modifying it in any way I think of another great reason why it is perfect for what I am trying to accomplish. In these posts I’ll try my best to justify exactly what I mean by Full Potential.
#1
This first reason, the original reason, has something to do with my past and hopefully a lot to do with my future. A little over 3 years ago, after I came back from a few months in Europe where I had really found a hunger for photography and capturing amazing images. At the time I didn’t have any specific vision, I just really loved capturing the world around me. I started to really think about my career and what path I had taken to get to this point, I had an engineering degree, had worked for about 2 years as an engineer and now had discovered something that sparked my interest and passion much more than anything I had done in academics or really in my entire life. When i would see the images that I was creating and see the reactions that people had to then, I was like a 5 year old on Christmas morning again. I was happily unemployed at the time and really started reflecting on how it took me this long to find something that I was so passionate about and how my educational and career choices were so far from this passion.
Thinking back as far as grade school, one memory kept coming into my head, it wasn’t full potential but the exact opposite.I began to recall that a number of teachers, counselors, coaches, law enforcement officers, and professors had, at some point in my past, said that “I had so much potential“, or “if I focused I could reach my potential“, or “that I was so smart but not working to full potential“, etc. Maybe some day I will have my mom dig through my old report cards and find where teachers had noted this (amongst other things) on my report cards and detention slips.
I realized that it wasn’t that I wasn’t reaching my potential, it was that the ‘potential‘ that everyone thought I had (me included) was not in sitting at a desk working as an engineer- but it was in creating captivating images. Realizing this, I came up with the name full potential but had no real idea of how to do anything with photography other than shoot as a hobby. Still don’t