I was not a great student. And, like, I want to be clear that this isn’t false modesty; it’s just the truth. I was creative and happy, but I was distracted and not fully aware that my brain worked differently from that of a traditional learner.
READ ON TO DISCOVER
The sentence a teacher said to me in high school that I’ve been living off for nineteen years
The File: the folder I keep of every nice thing anybody has said, and how to start yours tonight
The photos I took of a newborn who is now eighteen, and the message his mother sent me out of the blue
Where September’s Six photo prompts stand at halfway, and what you’ve sent me so far
How to photograph your kid without showing their face, from my week with the royals
Photo shoot availability with Ana in NYC, The Hamptons, Westchester and Westport
Then I took photography class at Santa Cruz High School with a teacher named Mr. Wills, and he told me I had good instinct. A good eye. That I’d taken to the medium. That my printing was technically strong (I’d never been complimented for anything technical before) and that my dedication to photography had the kind of momentum behind it to go the extra mile.
Whether it was true or not, it felt like the first time a teacher had told me I was good at anything.
For a long time I told that story as a sad one, because it sounds like photography won by default. It didn’t. What actually happened is that school had spent a decade measuring a narrow set of things I did not really have, and then one room finally measured something I did, and somebody said it out loud. And it felt good.
Nineteen years later I’m still clicking pics. And Mr. Wills surely has no idea the difference he made.
How to keep a folder of every nice thing anyone has said
Here’s a thing I keep, and it isn’t a photograph.
A folder on my phone. This was my friend Leah Fink’s idea, and she calls it “F*ck Yeah File”.
Screenshots of nice things people have said. A text from a client. An unexpectedly generous line in an email. Something kind my husband said, with a cadence I didn’t want to lose. Evidence.
Leah says she also uses hers for things like thank-you cards, or even after nailing a killer gig: the paid invoice, as a reminder of reaching beyond previous limiting beliefs, of achieving, and of gratitude.
We are all excellent at cataloging our failures. I happen to be a gold medalist in this sport. And you too, probably. Most people can list theirs right now, in order, with dates. Almost nobody can do the same with the evidence that they made a difference in somebody’s life.
Here’s why this isn’t just a feel-good exercise.
There’s a well-documented thing psychologists call negativity bias, and the shorthand for it is bad is stronger than good. A negative event lands harder, lasts longer, and gets processed more thoroughly than a positive one of exactly the same size. Criticism outweighs praise, reliably, in study after study. It isn’t a character flaw. It’s standard equipment.
Which means your internal record is not neutral. You are not misremembering. You are running an archive that logs every failure in full and files the good stuff in a loose pile on a picnic table, outdoors. On a windy day. Gone.
And mothers get a second helping. The research on self-compassion keeps turning up the same asymmetry: women are dramatically better at extending compassion outward than inward, and researchers tie it directly to being raised into the nurturing, self-sacrificing role. In postpartum studies, how harshly a woman responds to herself is the single variable most strongly linked to depression.
And on an ADHD brain, which is the brain I have, criticism gets filed in bold and praise gets filed in pencil.
So. You already have a complete, meticulously maintained, obsessively detailed record of everything you have ever done wrong.
What you don’t have is the other file.
That isn’t a self-esteem problem. It’s a filing problem. And filing happens to be my entire new personalityyyy.
Emotional Filtering
I’m not the first person to land on this idea, and the version I found this week is better than mine.
Kelly Banks writes The Dopamine Dispatch, about ADHD, and she has a wonderful piece on the lies your brain tells you. Two of them are exactly what I’m describing.
One she calls emotional filtering: you walk out of an interview having answered nearly everything well, and the only thing you can think about is the question you fumbled.
The other is minimization, and her example took the top of my head off. Her clients sit down and open with “I didn’t do anything this week.” Then they unpack the week together and find that they did an enormous amount.
Leah does this in her coaching too, where she has you identify three things you want to celebrate yourself for this month. It can be hard to come up with! But those three things are there.
Four things that landed in my file this week
The family whose newborn photos I took nineteen years ago. Those kids are fifteen and eighteen now. She wrote out of the blue to say they’d moved house; they moved the photo wall with them, and the pictures still make her smile every day.
A second family, no connection to the first. Two little girls who are now not so little, and who live in the South now. They’ve had other photographs taken since. Mine are still their favorites.
A third family I've been photographing for eight summers mentioned in today's session that they'd love lots of kids-only photos, because they have a whole wall of them. I had no idea. She sent me a picture of the wall. I can’t get over how lovely it was to see my work in the world like this.
Now it feels like I’m making this up, or perhaps I’m a witch, but I just got a fourth poke from a treasured client, tagging me in a post of her photo wall, literally as I type this. Whaa—?! And she has such great taste. (Thank you, Jessica!)
All unrelated. All in one week. All about work I had long stopped thinking about. My file is swelling!
And I would never have known. None of them had to write to me. Nothing prompted it. If they hadn’t, I’d have none of it.
Four in one go is not normal, obviously. The universe understood the assignment.
People do say the nice things. You’re just not keeping them.
Start yours tonight
The fix is much smaller than the problem. You don’t have to believe the nice thing. You don’t have to feel worthy of it or sit with it or do anything at all with your feelings. You just have to keep it.
Screenshot. Folder. Done. Ten seconds, no emotional labor required. Belief can come later, or never. The evidence is there either way.
It's the same move I use for saving inspiration: collect first, judge later, let the pattern turn up on its own.
Go back through your texts, your email, your screenshots, and find three. Just three. Then keep adding for a year.
So tell me
Who was your Mr. Wills, and have you ever told them?
It might feel good to type it out!
September's photo prompts for parents, at the halfway mark
We’re halfway through September and the first month of The Six is running in public.
If you missed it, The Six is a monthly series of photo prompts for parents, with a pro photographer’s tip from me on how to nail the shot.
As promised, September Prompt #4, The Selfie Portrait-mode Hack, now has a how-to on Instagram:
If you took a first-day photo for the Bookends, find it now and put it somewhere you can locate it in June.
There are two and a half weeks left in the month, so nothing is over. All six prompts are here, still free for everybody!
In October, The Six becomes a paid perk, with one prompt always free. This thing keeps going in directions I didn't plan, as people actually use the prompts and tell me what's working, and honestly I’m here for it. Don’t forget to leave me your advice even if you don’t feel like submitting your photo!
To submit your photo: Hit reply to this email! Sending it means I might feature it here, with your first name, or without your name if you'd rather. Tell me which. (Or ana@anagambuto.com)
How to photograph your kid without showing their face
I got asked to talk about something I think about constantly and have never written down here: how do you photograph your kid when you don’t want to show their face?
It came up because Prince George started at Eton this week, and because Meghan has gotten genuinely inventive about posting her children without posting their faces.
My friend Rachel Bowie asked me how a person does that on purpose. Here’s the whole piece.
The short version, and then the part I didn’t say:
Let the adult be the subject. Toss a little one in the air and face the camera yourself. Cup a three-year-old’s face so only part of it shows. Ask a big kid to do a cartwheel, so the face is turned away by the physics of it.
Use the environment. A giant leaf held up in front of a face is a fall photo and a privacy screen at the same time. Photograph them walking away and let the focus sit on their hair, or the outfit, or the back of a neck.
And the one I do the most: selfie timer on, camera flat on the ground, kids spinning around it. I walk away with hair in the breeze, a profile mid-laugh, a blur of legs. Two frames that work out of forty is plenty.
Here’s the part I didn’t say in the interview. The face is not actually the thing you’re trying to keep. What you want is this year. The neon-yellow pants my toddler refused to take off for a month. The preschooler who is still willing to hold my hand on the way to the bus stop. Those are dated and specific and they will wreck you in ten years, and not one of them requires a face.
Who are you posting for? I’m posting for future me. That question settles almost every version of this argument before it starts.
One more thing, and then the vote.
Here’s the thing I noticed about the photos you sent me. Walls. Light on a floor. Shoes by the door, and several clever things you’re going to bookend. The thing somebody outgrew.
Almost none of them have a face in them, and I don’t think that’s an accident. I think you were right, and I was asking wrong.
So something is changing in October, and I’ll tell you about it then.
Do you post your kids' faces online?
Last week I asked you if getting School Picture Day tips in your inbox would be fun. Five people replied, all saying yes! Look out for that next week.
I told you something's changing in October. This is the question underneath it.
Results next issue, as always.
This post contains affiliate links via ShopMy and Amazon. If you buy through them, it costs you nothing and occasionally buys me a latte!
What I read, bought and watched this week
How to set yourself up for success this Fall by thoughtfully lowering the bar: Amy Shoenthal’s the Sunday Set-Up really spoke to me with this idea.
Beauty is not my beat, but I do evangelize this to everyone, if they ask. Many of us in our forties are wearing less makeup, but I find myself wearing it more and with more pleasure than before. That said, I rarely have the time to apply it. But when I do, I want it to stay put and this setting spray has changed the game for me on my aging (whateverrr) skin.
My husband and I were marveling at the talent of Norah Jones and Harry Mack freestyling in this viral clip, please do watch and let it make your day! She tosses him random words like “seratonin” and he makes it pure magic.
Meme of the Week
Like, guys, honestly, the longer I live, the fewer things I know.
Fall Shoot Dates: Family photos with Ana
Announcing dates here before they hit the open airwaves of Instagram!
I have openings in September, October and November in NYC, the Hamptons, Westport and Westchester.
The Hamptons: Saturday, October 17th, Sunday, November 8th, various weekdays
NYC: Friday, 9/25, Saturday, 10/3, Sunday, 10/4, Sunday, 10/18 (morning)
Westport: Sunday, 10/11
Westchester: Sunday, 10/18 (afternoon)
Email me to snag a booking. ana@anagambuto.com
Everything above is me asking you to keep proof that you’re good at something. So here’s what I think I’m good at: making the ordinary extraordinary, at the potential expense of good sense. I feel good at making memories for others, and for myself. When I look at my f*ck yeah file, I think, yeah. I’m proud of me.
Make the folder. It takes ten seconds and one day it will be there to make a dark day brighter.
hugs!!
Ana
I do this also with wins. So when I’m having one of those days where nothing feels like it’s going right I read it! Helps put everything in perspective.
Ana I LOVE THIS.