Every day can be a new beginning
Even though it may sound a little cheesy or straight from a self-help book, I believe it is a good piece of advice and one that I sometimes say to myself when things get rough.
We all have bad days, bad weeks, bad seasons. We can have little or no inspiration at all during certain periods of our life and that’s O.K. It means that we are not machines even though this world tries real hard to make us feel precisely that way.
Whenever I feel that I’ve reached a plateau in my photography or simply I don’t feel inspired, sometimes I grab my camera and just go to the city. I can use it or not, but the important thing is that I am there, where things can happen. I try to be open and look for anything that can spark my interest, anything that can ignite me, photographically speaking. I try to be formless (remember Bruce Lee?). I try to forget my style for a while. Just a man with a camera, no pressure.
Sometimes, doing this exercise I go back home with zero photos. Nothing was interesting enough or I just couldn’t see it. Sometimes I get home and after culling the photos they’re all rubbish and I delete them all. And sometimes, even a single photograph can make me see the world in a different way and it is the beggining of a new way of revisiting the same topics I already photographed, this time from another perspective, with another focus.
Having that skill as a photographer is really important because let’s be honest here, how many of us can travel the world non-stop and take photos now in Japan, later in London and next month in Istambul? I certainly can’t.
It’s easy to spark your creativity if you are always on the move. Not so much if you work during the week and take photos on the weekend (only the luckiest having both days to do so) and you are in some degree tied to your city.
I’ve found that you have to be playful, open, not so hard on you and your ‘style’. Take photos, analyse them at home, experiment a little bit.
I don’t know. It may only work for me, but I thought I’d share it.
Take care.
