6 Things for Photographers to do to win 2023… and Beyond
Perhaps we are so used to being in a rut we don’t know we are in one.
I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. Never have, really. None of them ever seemed to work for others, so expecting them to work for me was sorta silly.
And most of the ones I would read or hear from people were big, grandiose statements that you just knew were a flying mess of slimy spaghetti aimed at the nearest plaster wall.
And none of it ever stuck.
“This year I will lose 75 pounds.”
“This year I will triple my income.”
“This is the year I find true love.”
“This year I will not lose my temper… unless that guy from IT, what’s his name… Stew, that jerk shows up with his smug, arrogant expression and those stupid glasses, and a bit of morning’s breakfast on his tie holding his stupid clipboard, and starts telling me… wait… deep breath… again.
Anyway, screw Stew, we got a few things to talk about here and they are not pie-in-the-sky plans that make them impossible to accomplish. No, my friends, these we can all do.
Take more photographs.
OK, I can hear the groans.
“Jeeezzz, Don, tell us something we haven’t heard a thousand times by those YouTube gurus of all things photographic”.
Hey, you didn’t let me finish.
Take more photographs of everything and everyone in your life. If there is one thing the batflu taught us, it is that life is fragile, fleeting, and easily — far too easily — forgotten.
We have only a few years to rotate around this spinning ball of blue, and we spend far too much of it lonely, afraid, and forgetting who we are and why we are here.
From documentarian to artist, the photographer must make photographs of his or her world. It is what we do and why we are here.
We are not gifted with the ability to make photos that mean something just to make them of food. Or motorcycles. Or models. Or models with food on a motorcycle.
Stop limiting your view to only what you know, and make photographs of what you don’t know, have never known, and may never have thought in a million years that you would want to know.
I have no interest in professional sports. Zero. Zilch.
But I want to do something with pro football players behind the scenes. Discover something about something I know little to nothing about.
(OK, I do know that Michael Johnson was the best quarterback the Philadelphia Flyers ever had, and scored multiple goals when he played Brazil for the World Cup… But everyone knows that, so meh.)
Put all of your archives from 2019 — and before — away for a while.
Back in the analog days, we kept every negative we shot. In plastic sleeves, in archival plastic sleeves that is, in archival boxes.
It was inconvenient to cut out a single image from a row of 6 and try to store it and so the habit of keeping everything stayed with us. And on rare occasions, we would pull a neg sheet or two and hit the darkroom with a new paper.
But now it is so easy to go tripping through the terabytes of images just looking for something we can try that new software on that we stop making and just refry the hell out of the stuff we have.
See number one above for how to get rid of this time-wasting behavior.
Learn something new about something old.
Do you still have a film body or two sitting around?
If you don’t, you can skip this one.
And, before I say this I want you to know that I feel your pain and the deep fear that we manifest when shooting without that little “ya done good” screen on the back.
But intrepid folks did it before… and I believe it is one of the ways to connect again to the amazing craft of photography.
Move slower, frame with more precision, meter, move a little to the right, frame again… think about it… move over a bit more and get lower… frame, frame, a twist of the zoom… click.
Just, you know, ‘click’.
Not clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick
(damn them fast cameras are sweet, but there is something to be said for approaching the making of a photograph with the cold, steely-eyed practice of a well-trained assassin.
You can be the Jason Bourne or Atomic Blonde of photography.
Print your stuff.
For me, the joy of photography is the print, the thing, in a frame, box, mount, or spray glued on some sort of board.
In fact, it isn’t yet a photograph — not totally — until it is on paper of some kind.
You can get great printers these days, and they don’t have to cost an arm and a leg either.
I use both Canon and Epson, and I print on wonderful, luxurious, beautifully surfaced Red River and Moab papers, but you can choose from a litany of magnificent printing surfaces offered today.
Just holding the print, carefully going through the process of framing of it, or putting it in one of the archive boxes seems so satisfying. Like watching your oldest head out the door for college, or the night shift at Burger King.
S’all good. They are on their own now. They have their own life to live.
Spend more time looking through a viewfinder than looking at a phone 24" away.
The viewfinder is a sacred space, mate. It is where we make the decisions that are drawn from our vision. It is in this holy chamber of light that we can examine the corners, check on the focus depth, trim the foreground or raise the background, or do any number of 1,354,629 possibilities that we make in less than a second, or as much as an hour.
(Yes, I spent an hour one day at a little pool of water in the rocks along Big Sur. Shooting on my gorgeous old wooden 8x10 Deardorff, I was totally flummoxed by my inability to create a good composition. I knew one was there — I could just feel it — but it took me an hour to find it. I exposed one sheet of TMax when it finally revealed itself to me. Alas, it wasn’t what I wanted and didn’t make the cut from that day.)
These days you will not find me without a camera in close proximity. I am very fond of old digital (and analog) cameras and have a nice collection of them. There will be no more acquisitions for the time being (unless I can find a particular old Sony from 2011 at a good price). We must learn the difference between a deep fondness and an out-of-control obsession although there are a few more that I still feel I must have.
I am fonder of the old cameras with viewfinders, but I have a few “screen-centric” oldies that make incredible photographs.
And whatever they are, they are not my phone. And they don’t make photos like my phone. And I can’t check Facebook on them… well, you knew that already.
I have a good phone, and of course, will take advantage of that miraculous little tool when events are deemed appropriate. But for now… Immaloving the viewfinder.
And the files… so much to love in these old sensors.
Spend more time outside, and less in the chair in front of backlit pixels.
And sure, yeah… photography for sure.
But also just for you. Get outside.
Walk barefoot on the earth.
Dance in the rain.
Climb to peaks you want to just look out from.
And take photographs where appropriate.
Remember above where I said I am rarely without a camera? That’s true.
But I didn’t say I had to shoot all the time.
Taking time away from the constant need to be making is also a kind of making in itself.
The brain becomes less noisy, and the thoughts more clear. Ideas come to fill the void of the making making making and — on occasion — they bring ideas of what to make when we get the time.
After we put our shoes on, hike down the trail, and spend a couple of hours thinking about them. Usually with a sketch pad in our hands.
And a pencil.
(Have you ever used a Blackwing #2 pencil? Seriously. It is one of those experiences you do not forget. Pure freakin’ joy.)
OK, that’s it for today.
And now full disclosure, this was written to me by me for me. These are my action plans for 2023 and I thought they may also resonate with some of you. I hope they do. Or at least make you think about some action plans to start for yourselves.
2022 sucked, and quite frankly 2023 is not off to a hot start, so we will remain cautious but positively hopeful for a better trip around the old ball of flame.
But there ya go, and now I gotta go. There’s this mountain that I haven’t trekked to the top of, so I’m gonna pack the bike and twist the throttle.
Later.
(All photos are mine.)
I am a photographer, designer, and photo editor. You can find me at my self-named website or at Project 52 Pro System (enrollment begins January 6, 2023) where I teach commercial photography online. This is our tenth year of teaching, and it is the most unique online class you will find anywhere.
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You can find my books on Amazon, and I have taught two classes at CREATIVELIVE.