In the market, there is a perceived need to have a unique selling proposition for differentiation. When things become too common and saturated, value will depreciate according to the law of supply and demand.

It is always a balancing act in the marketplace, you can’t be too unique as that usually means there is no demand for your product; you can’t be too common either, because that means anybody can easily take away your market share. Businesses usually strive for somewhere in the middle; they know that when there is competition, there is demand and to stay competitive, they need to be unique in their offerings.

There is this notion that the world is saturated with artists. Creatives seemed to be everywhere and hence there is always the dilemma of how valuable creative work actually is. It becomes more difficult when we try to deduce something that is intangible into dollars and cents.

I noticed that in the commercial art world, being an artist is always more or less about competition or cooperation. We compete for attention with our crafts, if not we cooperate with someone else to do something bigger and end up competing again with something else out there. When we focus on all these, that uniqueness of individuality is lost because you are either doing art for someone or against somebody.

In photography, there might just be an alternate path. There is only you and your camera. You are neither shooting for someone else or shooting against others. (If you are not doing it commercially that is.) You are expressing yourself with what you care about seeing in the world, and sharing that vision in the process.

Photography itself is intrinsically unique in a sense that it is very difficult to duplicate what you see. If I purposely try to take two similar pictures, it would be close to impossible. Even the act of pressing the shutter would have cause minute shake to alter the views, especially when doing macro photography. There are no two pictures that are exactly the same because the world is always constantly moving and changing.

This is one of the reasons I love photography because it is hard not to be unique—not to be naturally you. For no one can see the world like you do.

To embrace the essence of photography is to embrace uniqueness itself. Only when you are attune to your natural uniqueness, then life would be able to flower for you.