Like may creative people, I often suffer from a bit of a creative slump. This can manifest itself in just wandering about and not taking any photos or not taking any good (or even mediocre) photos. Personally, I find there are two effective ways to get myself out of this creative slump.
The first is to go back to basics and read up on some lovely theory and see if there is any way of triggering some creative juices. Recently this tactic has made me come up with a new project that should see me though the next year or so, with the bonus of having some ‘grounding’ in critical theory. Not that this is always a consideration, I do believe you can take photographs for the pure pleasure of just taking photographs. My main impetus for taking photographs to start with often falls to just seeing what the resulting view/area/place/thing looks like as a photograph. Sometimes it works, sometimes not.
The second way to get myself back into the swing of things is to go somewhere different and see if I can take any photos that I like. These I consider ‘practice’ photos. They are often not made to be shown, although one or two may make it onto Instagram. Quite often these practice photos will serve as a way of also honing my editing – both from an image selection and a literal editing of the raw files in Lightroom. Just playing about and seeing what works.
In a lovely New Year creative slump in early January – probably bought on by the fact the sun had yet to make an appearance – I headed out to Firestone Copse, a wood a short drive away on a barely above freezing grey day with the sole goal to try and take some ok-looking photos.
While I generally call myself a ‘landscape photographer’ that is more a result of SEO management and laziness as I find it hard to make my work fit into a specific genre. Especially as someone who would like to be found on the internet or to briefly tell people what I generally photograph without them giving me a blank stare. I’ve mentioned my uncomfortableness of this a few times in the past, and it will be something I continue to grapple/figure out. For now, ‘landscape photographer’ it is, although my current work is only barely skirting with other peoples assumptions with this, especially as I generally don’t really photograph ‘traditional’ landscapes much.
Anyway, I headed off to the woods and away from my usual urban psychogeographical wandering. Now I do love a bit of forest photography and appreciate Simon Baxter’s work and can quite happily watch his YouTube channel for a long time. It is definitely a skill capturing trees well, and something that in the future I’m not discounting, but it’s not my current subject (despite a photo last year of a tree), so heading to the woods was a little bit daunting. Especially as it was very cold, dark, grey, spitting with rain and unfortunately no fog (a pre-requisite for any decent woodland photos).
Setting the limitations
To try and counter this, I decided to give myself some limitations. I took the trusty XPro-2 with an unintentionally nearly flat battery so this was one limitation, but the main criteria were to shoot everything at 35mm, on a tripod, and using the B/W (Acros) Film sim. This was coupled with my own way of shooting which I’ve stuck to for a while now, and that is to only allow myself three frames in any location. My reasoning being if I’ve not got a good shot in three frames it probably still won’t be a good shot after 20. While the nearly flat battery was unintentional, it helped constain me further as I knew that it would run out at some point, it was just a matter of when so I had to make the most of the time.
The 35mm focal length is not one that I generally use much. Most of my work is 23mm, but it was quite refreshing to work with the narrower FOV, and one that I would like to work with again. The B/W simulation was another new one. While I’ve shot lots of B/W film in the past, I’ve always converted the occasional digital shot to B/W which personally I’ve never been fully happy with as they seemed to always be a bit ‘muddy’. I have found that using the Fuji film profiles in Lightroom helps a lot, so I’m putting my past issues down to user error. Going out with a purely B/W mindset certainly took a bit of time to get back in to – thinking about tone and texture over colour separation.
Taking the tripod was a way of slowing down. This allows me to think about what I am photographing, making sure I get my framing right and really concentrate on the scene in front of me before I trip the shutter. Again, this was a welcome departure to my usual loose, wandering way of working. I think I was out for about an hour and a half and managed about 40 frames.
The photos
As for the photos? Well, they are nothing special. I got some nice shots and some that I’m happy with which are illustrating this article. The aim of this jaunt was to work within some constraints, not to get portfolio-worthy shots. I do think that going to the woods and shooting colour, with a range of focal lengths without the tripod would have yielded less photos I like, and I think I would have learnt less, and ultimately not come away with a renewed sense of creativity.
Rather than being limitations, these constraints do help to open the creative pathways and allow me to think differently. As previously mentioned, I try to always limit myself to three frames, which I believe has helped me hone my creative eye and stop me from just firing off frames at random. I personally feel that this allows more skill to come from knowing how or where to photograph something and knowing exactly when to trip the shutter than randomly firing off 10 or 15 shots in the hope of one good frame.
Overall, this was a fun (if horrendously cold) experience and taught me a lot (even after 25 years photographing) about how I work and different ways to work in the future. Being more open to a 35mm focal lengths is one takeaway that I do want to use more, and the other – strangely – was to get back and shoot more B/W film, or even film in general. I do miss shooting film, but the cost is the only thing holding me back. My friend is shooting Ektachrome currently…
Limit yourself and shoot more!
February Update
I admit that I have not posted up as much as I should recently. For 2025 I have some exciting things in the pipeline. While I don’t like to talk about things before they happen, I’m tidying up a project that I’ve been working on intermittently since the end of 2023 and have a new project in the works that I’m figuring out how to photograph.
I also have a couple ‘academic’ articles that I’m currently writing, which I hope to put out in the coming months, and lastly, just to get out and shoot more – and shoot more film!
As always, you can follow me on Instagram and I also post up on Foto – the new photography based photo app. Don’t forget that you can buy selected prints in my shop (there are also some more traditional actual landscape photos in there too).
