Rekindling the Love for Landscape Photography
I have a confession to make. For the last year or perhaps even longer, I no longer feel as passionate about landscape photography as before. Will this mean the end, a change or a fresh start?
Well, much like you, I also have a creative rut from time to time. It usually lasts from December to April. But since the year before covid started, those dry spells are longer and more frequent. What’s going on? It’s time for an honest examination here.
The Need to Produce
Full time professional photographers don’t have a the luxury that I have. At least I still have a part-time day job that only just pays the bills. In my FAQ you can read that I’m a writer and content manager. When I started out making photography my business, I vowed that I would not do anything within photography that I don’t really want to do. That puts me in a luxury position: I can earn (extra) money with photography when I want to, doing what I want.
But this article isn’t about paying the bills. It’s about wanting to do anything with photography really.
The Role of Social Media in This
Quitting social media like Facebook, 500px and Instagram has created much needed breathing space for the better part of last year. For me, the source of mental pressure wasn’t just the evolution of the platforms, the algorithms and the blatant stealing of intellectual property that made me reconsider the point of posting. After covid, the war in Ukraine dominated everyone’s stories, as did the NFT boom. It slowly but surely wasn’t about landscape photography anymore in the ‘landscape community’, (if there is such a thing).
On top of that, I’m much more susceptible to one annoying comment than a thousand positive ones. It’s a combination of factors that first prompted me to a new strategy on social media: post and run. But post and run is exactly why your photos will not get shown on the timelines or feeds of other users. Boy have I seen the effect from that. From a few thousand likes to a few dozen in the first day within posting to Instagram, just by changing my own behavior instead of frequency or timing of posting. And so I figured: why post at all if those images aren’t shown anyway? If just a thousand of 64.000 followers like your photo, is it worth the effort?
Well yes and no. If you’re looking for ego gratification, then social media is a great tool. A thousand likes on a photo? Who doesn’t want that? It can boost your confidence and make you think you’re an influencer within no-time. However, if you’re looking for things that can give meaning and personal enrichment, then either look elsewhere or don’t look at the numbers at all. A handful of like-minded people on there can give you all you need in that regard, even if you don’t post anything at all.
My point is that because I see social media as a necessary evil, I don’t feel the need to produce for those platforms.
Other Priorities
Newsletter subscribers know that I’ve been in the process of moving house over the last year. And we’re far from done making this fixer-upper our dream home. Most of it is due to time constraints. So I need to cut back in my other pursuits, while maintaining sanity. To do that, I need a hot medium. That’s a term coined by sociologist Marshal McLuhan, meaning that I need to do something that requires my undivided attention without distraction. Sometimes post-processing does that, but most of the time it’s making music that does that. It has for my entire adult life. Imagine playing the drums. It’s hard to think about anything else than just be with the rhythm and the drum kit while playing either physically or mentally demanding stuff. It’s this meditative quality of shutting off that loud mind of mine that helps to keep a certain balance. When photography or post-processing do not do that for me, then I need to do something else.
A Change
Perhaps it’s time for a change. A change of pace, approach, subject or even career path. Maybe I’ve outgrown a certain creative period of my life. Painters have their chapters too right? The famous blue period or impressionist period. Well, the benefit of not having to live off photography and no audience on social media to please, is that the future is wide-open. I kind of dislike working on the immensely time-consuming blends nowadays; the HDR-pano-focus stacks. What are we even doing here? I often love the results, but the process is not enjoyable at the moment. And so I have literally years of raw files adding up. Terabytes of unprocessed, unfinished images sitting on the hard drive.
One of the latest images that I produced that involved dozens of raw files. For the focus stack, the perfect balance of light and clouds and a darker sky to accommodate for dynamic range.
Although there are also smaller projects. Just a top-down view of cool pattern in the ice or sand at twilight. To be honest, I think this is where my creative pursuit takes me next. Knowing full-well that saying goodbye to the explosive skies with the flowers in the foreground will further dwindle my following. But is that important? It’s an important question to ask right now: if photography doesn’t yield an extension of income (money), will I continue to do this?
At the moment, this is what I am most happy with. It’s not an aerial. No, it’s just my camera pointed down at the edge of a glacier in Iceland. Belly height; not several hundred meters in the air.
I find it hard to answer that right now. Currently, my photography income is very little from much more sources than you probably would think:
50% Workshops (one day) and tours (many days)
20% Post-processing video tutorials
10% Writing articles for magazines
10% Books and e-books
7% Selling prints
3% Legal department (people and businesses stealing my images who get their asses sued by my lawyer)
The reason for wanting to pursue landscape photography as a career for me was always “as long as it pays for itself”, meaning that any repairs for the gear that I own will be refunded by what I do. That would keep me entertained and happy for the rest of my life. Well, as long as you enjoy photography, great. But what if you don’t?
In the end, all hobbies that turn out to be jobs will be just that: jobs. It is up to us to steer that ship of life into a direction that makes us happy.
All this staring down at the landscape is probably because of all this staring inwards. What do I want from life? What’s here and now as opposed to what’s out there?
Personal Values
Then there is the aspect that is becoming much more important in my life as well. Not living life at the expense of other beings. That’s why I will be revising my workshops in the coming months or perhaps even years. I’m not planning additional workshops until I have figured this out for myself. Navel gazing and looking at these intimate landscapes for long enough has made me realize how important certain aspects of those workshops are. I’ve considered combining a wellness retreat with photography, offering a photography fueled mindfulness experience and going on a week long vegan-friendly tour. This is the direction that I want to take my business in right now; using art to explore what it is to be human instead of chasing after the shot that we’ve all seen a thousand times on social media and finding the tripod holes of the previous photographer. It should be about more than taking pictures, because I believe personal enrichment leads to better, more diverse art.
At the time of writing, I’m a bit glass half-empty. You will have to excuse my honesty, because it’s the painting, sanding and building that gets me down right now. It’s going to be much better when I get out of this rut. Maybe with the aid of photography, maybe not. We will have to see.