Are you experiencing creative block? Do you have a hobby or a passion that you can’t give up? Here we will be talking about photography. It’s a part of you and it sits sadly in the corner waiting for your attention. This stagnancy has crept in and you’ve lost your desire to even touch the equipment and feel that full creative block.
Maybe you’ve worked some aspect of it as a job for a short time and it sucked your soul dry. The stress rises just thinking about doing it again. You can’t quite press the Go button to sell off the equipment or give it away. It sits quietly gathering dust and becoming a trip hazard.
How do we regain our desire to get back into it? How do we stop the break up with our passion project? Artists have shared with me that they haven’t touched their photography equipment since this thing happened that made them stressed out and sad. For example shooting and editing weddings. This has broken more than one photographer out there, killing their will to ever pick up their photography equipment again.
The image below is a boring not well executed photo of under a bridge along the Seine River in Paris. This snap shot had to happen because of the masked duck that’s mounted just up and out of reach. It’s the tiny bit of magic in an otherwise unremarkable image and makes me laugh every time just like the first time I noticed it.
The point of this example is to take the pressure off of yourself to be perfectly executing a prize winning image every time you go out. Your purpose is to take the stress levels down and just enjoy what you see. It’s your own journey to find little gems wherever you are that bring you peace and a bit of joy. This approach will start the trickle and create the flow that can bring back the more serious sessions that might produce the next Pulitzer. We need to start somewhere.
We need to do this with the pursuit of joy, personal joy, and nothing else. This is how we bring back the creative fun parts that have disappeared into the mist.
How do you ‘relax and enjoy’ again? As a creative, I have many expressions of what’s in my pea brain, it’s really hard to stay focussed to finish one idea. I don’t want to copy others in contrast there is always something to learn from how others do a thing. Some exposure to other artists is always a good idea. I often look at a photograph that inspires me from another photographer and try to reverse engineer it on my own.
Pick something, anything, to use that as your goal that day. We will stick with photography as our example activity. Sometimes I pick a colour and a thing. For example, I may assign myself to look for anything the colour green with the thing being a leading line, or blurring. My focus is to shoot anything the colour green and abstract it into something else, that may or may not make sense. I will then leave my images alone for a week or so until my image expectations diminish and then review with fresh eyes. You don’t always see the success in creative work right away.
Did I find joy? Is there any happy accident? This process takes the pressure off and distresses me. I’m about to make ugly art and I remember that absolutely no one cares. I love the surprise of something turning out beautifully, or at least interestingly, in all its’ messiness. That can be pretty special. Below is an image that has all of the three criteria above.
This image was taken in a derelict cannery of the many coloured fishing nets along the West Coast of Canada. Green, with strong leading lines and blurry. This was the week I learned to play and I completely renewed and regenerated my love of photography. It was the beginning of my deep dive into creative vision and artistic photography and it definitely improved my daily documentary style that we all have and is often the killjoy of our art.
We forget to take the pressure off of technical perfection and just play. It works.
If you’re local to Vancouver BC, and want to pick up a one day exercise in play, have a look at my little workshops on Eventbrite. Let’s make it a play date!