Now, if you passed the awful intro, photographically speaking I've been quite busy. If you're asking yourself the answer is no, I wasn't out in the freezing cold taking pictures, some people did and congrats to them, but I find it much more comfortable to go out for running (yup, running) rather than roaming around the city with a camera in my hands. That and also I've been quite busy with work as well, but back to our business which, on this blog at least, it's photography.
What I've been doing lately is some retrospective work, if I may call it like that. After returning from my second trip in India I couldn't find the proper state of mind to go photowalking around the city at all. I did instead two portrait sessions for two friends and I volunteered for a event as a photographer and that's it, but I started to go through the thousands of pictures that were just laying around on my hard drive, especially the ones I got from the first trip in India.
So I went around that huge pile of pictures, day by day, just a couple of minutes, each day I selected 1-2 pictures, spent some time in Lightroom, then post them on 500px and Leica-Fotopark (I love Leica-fotopark, but I will talk about this on a future post, and this promise I'll keep) and also on my fb page ( Tryingtodoart). During this process something interesting happened, I started to appreciate photography again, more and more. Well, I am also reading this book "The Creative Photographer" by Andreas Feininger and it's an awesome lecture, especially if you feel that you are stuck like I was. As i know that long posts are boring and nobody reads them unless it's a list somewhere, even if I'm certain that too many people wrote it it's too late, you got so far so here it is:
HOW TO UNLOCK THE PHOTOGRAPHER IN YOU
1. Go back in time
Look through that hard drive of yours where you stash the pictures you never look at ever again. For sure there is some gold somewhere around there just waiting for you to look at it from a different angle.2. Read
Pick any book about photography, it even doesn't need to be a good one, if it's a bad one you'll know it but at least you know where you stand. You may want to do this step before the first one. You may change your angle faster like that.3. Explore
Look at what kind of photography others are doing, and while you're at it like, vote, rate, comment on the ones that move you, and if you have some pictures of yours around there they will return the favor, everybody knows that this is how it works on photography platforms, give attention in order to receive attention, and eventually something will make you want to start taking pictures again, either either an idea for a photo project, or something else, who knows.4. Travel
Go and see places. Changing the air may do the trick.5. Narrow it down
Try thinking about a subject and focus only on that. Maybe you shot whatever you encountered and you need to limit your searching area6. New toys
Intentionally I left this one last: try some different equipment, it may work, but think about the phrase: "baby it's not you, it's me", you may end up spending good money for a dust collector, if you are going to buy it, but wise it would be to just rent it and see how it goes. (I am not really recommending this if someone is stuck but rather if you feel you want a different approach or you know it would serve its purpose) and let's face it, somebody around there is doing something great with some equipment identically with yours, so gear shouldn't be an excuse.And the show can go on, but I am too bored to write anymore, I think this is a record for my blog, and I really want to post some last-year-but-recently-found-and-edited-pictures, (I think it's a name too long to be hashtagged :))) )
Arrival
Egg seller
Orange meeting
