Categories
Tag: Outdoors
Last weekend, or more like a week and a half ago now, my wife and I went up in the mountains to a Young Life camp with the high school students we work with at our church. Not uncommon for an event like this a student took a trip to the hospital, and this time I was designated to go along as the responsible adult. The hospital visit lasted all night resulting in my complete exhaustion for the rest of the weekend. Why do I mention this? These five photos are my best ones from that weekend, and for each of them I really didn’t feel like shooting, but I forced myself to. After an all night stay at a hospital, I had reverted to survival mode, all I have to do is make it through the weekend, then I can sleep. But by forcing myself to shoot when I knew that I should, I created my best pieces. I have written here several times about re-learning. This is it again, I always hear people say “I take pictures when I feel like it”. But many of my best photos come from times when I don’t feel like it.
Categories
Suburban Winter II
As I am getting back into the swing of things, I am having to cover a lot of old ground. Like pushing my self to be creative, to even pick up the camera. I have lost some of the self confidence I had only a six months ago.
I get a block if I feel like I am going to shoot something that has been done before, like it won’t be real if I am not creating something completely unique. I have to remind my self that it doesn’t matter if someone else has something that looks similar, it is creating that is the point.
Sometimes start to shoot something then I stop and think, “no, that’s dumb”. I am so close, all I have to do is actuate the shutter. But I get a creative block, and I have to remind my self that it doesn’t matter what other people think.
Mostly though what I have to remind my self is to get out and shoot. I will never shoot anything good while just sitting around.
After a busy fall and Christmas season it is time for me to focus on this project again. The last several months I have been so busy that it was about all that I could do to post once per week. Now that I have my time and attention freed up, I want to get back to work improving my eye. To start, I need to remind myself that the photo that works is not always the one I set out to capture.
