How I Brought Joy Back to My Photography

Although I got my first camera at around age ten, I didn’t persevere with photography and over the intervening years I made several attempts to get back to this wonderful pastime, some of them short-lived.

I have been taking photography seriously now for almost seven years and have amassed a catalogue of thousands of images. I have charted my progress here in this blog, covering all the different types of photography that I have tried out over the last seven years, and I have noted my successes and failures in each genre.

However, even though I realise that photography is a lifelong process of learning, I found over recent months that the joy of photography began to lessen for me. I constantly felt that I wasn’t making any progress and that most of my images were no good. I felt that I had become obsessed with gaining technical perfection. I wanted to follow all the rules so that my images would look good to those who knew about photography, yet when I looked back at most of my images I felt nothing.

Then I heard a remark from a photographer on YouTube that went something along these lines:

It’s important to photograph what you want to photograph, not to be swayed by the opinions of others or to post images to gain likes. Be the photographer who sees what others don’t see and enjoy the process of doing what you love.

This gave me a lot of food for thought and I began to realise that this was the direction I wanted to take. I wanted to make images for myself, to photograph things that attracted me, to find out about the things that interested me and inspired me to take their picture.

Now when I go out, I feel like a photographer.

Even if I don’t have a camera with me, I am constantly observing, looking at little details, studying light, composing pictures in my head. I experience the joy of being involved in a creative process. I no longer crave technical perfection; rather, I aim for creative development.

Now I take images for myself.

I take fewer images but I like the ones I keep. Part of myself is invested in them. I have an emotional connection to them that I didn’t have to most of my earlier images – with a few exceptions.

Now, I like to look at my own images.

I like to see why they appeal to me and understand my connection to them. This gives my photography more purpose, more meaning and more joy.

My images may appeal to you, or they may not. But they are real. In some way these subjects or scenes spoke to me and inspired me to spend time over them, considering how best to compose them, how to position them in the frame, and how to edit them to convey most accurately what I saw in the field.

Below are some of my recent images that illustrate this new direction. Many of them are not 'pretty' images, and they will not be popular on social media, but I do feel emotionally connected to them and, to me, they have a story to tell.

Photographing in this way has renewed the joy in photography for me. The camera or lens is not so important; it’s the photographer’s eye that makes the image. This knowledge gives me great freedom to be myself, to be content with my current photography gear, to photograph the things I want to photograph and to grow creatively as a photographer.

A bonus to taking this direction in photography is that I seem to be directed to other photographers with a similar outlook and approach. This video from photographer Aristeidis Sfakianos called, I Stopped Taking Nice Photos - My Photography Improved, popped up just as I was finishing this post. My attention was drawn to the title, and the content resonates with me and seems to echo what I am saying.

You might like to watch it here.