I was reminded the other week that photography is often much better when it is uncomplicated, when you don’t overthink it, and when you just let yourself go with the flow.
I don’t think I’m unusual among those in the photography community in that I spend a lot of time reading about photography, looking at other people’s work and thinking about places to photograph. I’m constantly researching where I can go that will inspire me, or what locations I can visit to capture something new, unusual or different?
I know I’m also not alone when it comes to spending time thinking about photography equipment. What camera is best suited to the type of images I want to capture? What lens would be best for this photoshoot? Do I want to shoot this place on digital or on film? And then, more than often than not, I find myself down a YouTube rabbit hole researching kit, or film stock, or eBay prices.
You could of course take a view that this is all part of the photographic process, and will ultimately help me become a better photographer. The problem with all of this, however, is that it takes you away from the actual process of taking photographs – of creating.
As the writer Julia Cameron puts it in The Artist’s Way, “when a creative artist is fatigued, it is often from too much inflow, not too much outflow.” All that researching, watching and reading isn’t neutral – it’s taking the time and space I need to take photographs, filling up the same well I need to draw from to actually make something.
My wife – who is often much wiser than me on these matters – constantly reminds me that it is important that we spend more time creating than consuming.
Translated to my context – I should spend more time out making photographs than watching content about photography (or photography kit). Ironically this is also the message that I hear most often from one of the photographers I follow most closely on YouTube – Dan Milnor. He constantly reminds his viewers, in his slightly confrontational and deadpan way, that we won’t learn photography watching his videos on YouTube, the only way to learn it is to get out there and do it.
And when I hear that message I absolutely know that it’s right. Take for example, the pictures that I’ve shared with this post. These are of a quarry site that’s literally just over a mile from my house. I just picked up the camera and went. No effort to get there, no long journey, or meticulous planning. I can be there and photographing within 15 minutes of leaving my house.
Sevenoaks Quarry has loads of really great stuff to photograph that interests me. The aging conveyor belts and quarry machinery, an old and crumbling Oast House that sits in the middle of the processing machinery gradually being colonised by birds nests, the quarry pits themselves and the excavators sat around the periphery. And the best bit is there’s a public foot path that goes right through the middle of all of this so I don’t even feel I have to go out of my way or risk trespassing to access it.
Walking through the quarry on a warm summer’s evening with the sun low in the sky to the west, nobody else around, and my camera in hand, is just bliss. I have the place to myself. I can get lost in the process of framing a picture, thinking about how I can maximise the angle of the sun’s light to create interesting compositions with the old quarry machinery and the long shadows. As my confidence walking through the site grows, I challenge myself to be a little more adventurous and veer ever so slightly off the public right of way to see what interesting photographs might be waiting for me. I can feel myself thinking about the message I want to convey – these photographs as a record of an industrial place in decline (the quarry is due to close in a few years), an illustration – on a small scale – of how we extract resources and despoil the planet for our purposes.
In short, I am lost in the process of creating.
And all of this is right on my door step. It doesn’t require meticulous planning and loads of fancy kit. And if I compare how I feel when I’m out with my camera to how I feel when I’ve spent all evening on a screen, down a YouTube rabbit hole watching other people’s content there’s no contest. That’s not creating. I convince myself it’s part of the process but it’s not, it’s pseudo-creativity (coined from Cal Newport‘s term pseudo-productivity – how knowledge work has created a culture of endless meetings, emails and messaging as a proxy for real, meaningful work). Pseudo-creativity is spending all of your time watching, reading and talking about being creative as a proxy for deep, meaningful creation.
Sometimes the best experiences I’ve had as a photographer and when I’ve made my best pictures are when I haven’t spent too much time thinking about it, when I’ve resisted the urge to prevaricate about what kit to take out, when I’ve turned off the device, put down the book, and just gone out there and got on with it.
And so here’s my challenge to all of you reading this. If you looked honestly at how you spend your time on any given day or in any given week, what would be the balance of time you spend consuming rather than creating?
For me, when I’m out there with my camera, walking through the quarry or elsewhere, I know that is the only way I’m going to get better at my craft.
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