Doing The Work
A source of inspiration and answers to excuses
All of us sometimes struggle for photographic inspiration. We make a lot of excuses, dreaming of things that would give us that creative impulse, if only… Many of those things are lies. Trips to exotic places, new gear, more exciting people, all of the things that are not in the here and now. Today I thought I’d share a few antidotes to those lies we tell ourselves. Here’s the secret, the suggestions I make may not immediately produce inspiring work but they will lead you to something that will. I promise. What’s even better is that they will develop your eye, make you more familiar with whatever gear you use, make you a better photographer (no matter where you are in your photographic journey, and prepare you for those exotic places, exciting people, and other opportunities you may dream about.
Tell a story every day
Everyone can do this every day. Do not make it complicated or don’t make it complicated yet. Have a boring morning routine? Mine is making coffee, I do it every day first thing. Go ahead tell that story with a few pictures. Tomorrow do it better, tell the story just a little bit better. Make those pictures just a little bit better, use your camera a bit differently, experiment with long and short lenses, make the best pictures you can. Tell that story in three pictures, or five, or a dozen. How about breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or a snack? Make the best pictures you can, tomorrow make them better.
Have a favorite place you go often? Tell the story of that place next time you go. Tell it better next time. Go ahead use your phone if you must eventually use your big-boy camera. Are you too shy to shoot some of the people that are part of that place? Then don’t, at least not at first. Start to notice the light in and around that place, figure out how to use it to the best advantage. Heck, tell the story of your commute to work. Tomorrow do it better.
We all do things every day. Some of it is routine and therefore the easiest thing to shoot but also the least “inspiring”. Do your best to do it better and tell a better story over and over again. You don’t have to commit to telling the same story, the same way, you’ll probably find things to hone in on. Tell those stories. You’ll see things you didn’t the first time you tried, go after those. We all do out of the ordinary things that are not routine but we don’t see them because we are not looking at them as a story to be told with some pictures. We make things like new recipes, we do household projects, we fix things that are broken or need maintenance. Tell those stories through a few illustrations. Do your best to make them interesting, illustrative, creative, just do the work.
Tell a story of things other people do, or other that other people might want. I mentioned I did a project that took more than six months for my church. It wasn’t super “inspiring” every time I clicked the shutter but I did the work and the final result is something other people benefit from and I am happy I did the work. It was also a great opportunity to get a bit more refined in my tabletop lighting and macro photography work.
Find beauty and drama
Cameras are magic devices that allow almost limitless possibilities to edit the world around us. Find the beauty and drama in the mundane. Go ahead and do it the “right way”, then do it another way. Don’t bother stopping motion, exaggerate it or create it own your own. Use your camera to see the world a different way. Crop the world with abandon, get really close, or get really far. It’s amazing how either of those extremes can transform almost anything. Go for the abstract either completely or most of the time just part way to the abstract. You’ll be amazed at what a little bit of motion can do, especially if you’re stuck on the notion everything needs to be super sharp all of the time. The same can be true of focus choices, go ahead use a wide aperture close up on the “usual” place you’d focus, then focus on something else instead.
Scenes that are awful in the daylight can and usually are magical at night. Seriously, go do some night photography. Whatever you do not think you' need to make it look like daylight. The entire point is use the deep dense black to highlight the subject. Tonight go take your camera and frame up that gas station you stop at every other day with a lot of the surrounding blackness of night. Expose for the highlights only, trust me that ugly boring, generic suburban malaise will be transformed. If it isn’t you’re standing in the wrong spot.
Stand still in the middle of an oncoming crowd, take a few shots at lower and lower shutter speed while holding the camera as still as possible. Now do that at night where the light is interesting. Do the reverse, walk briskly while with other things on the sides static. Experiment with everything all the time while you are telling a story every day. You may have an idea of what that story is, it may become more clear after you make the pictures, do the work.
Quite a while back I suggested how to make fake contact sheets in Lightroom as part of your process. About halfway down that newsletter you’ll find what I think are a series interesting color abstract images. These were part of me “doing the work”. The work I decided I’d do that day was to find the beauty in the mundane, and somewhat ugly, scourge of modern decor — the ubiquitous plastic mini-blind. These devices plague me in almost every location I’ve ever had to make pictures. I hate these things, I consider them part of the crapification of the way the world looks. They look awful in photographs, a lot like wall outlets. I decided to figure out how to make them the actual subject. Not my best work. It took me about fifteen minutes. Was that a “project”? No, but it did lead me to other things, a lot of other things, and other ideas.
Embrace failure
Telling a story everyday, no matter how small, will fail. They will fail a lot. That’s not only okay, it’s good for you. In my recommendation of telling a super simple, super mundane story every day the important part was to do it again better the next day. This assumes most of these little stories will be failures. If you stop doing the work because it failed you are missing the point. Do it better tomorrow is the bigger point and that is what I mean by doing the work.
I hope these general suggestions might help those that struggle with finding “inspiration”. By no means do any of these everyday storytelling recommendations need to be epic exercises that take hours on a daily basis. The can and should be integrated into whatever is in your life everyday. If you still struggle and would benefit from a more specific thing to photograph or tell a story of with a more limited set of things to try, I’ll consider some kind of monthly or weekly assignment. Please let me know if that might be helpful to some of you.
Thank you to all of those readers that have so generously contributed to keeping the lights on with a paid subscription.
Love this issue!