As I look back through my images over the years, I realize that I am not the same photographer I once was. My craft has improved and the images are more visually interesting compositionally and have changed for the better. Hopefully the same is true for your photography. Perhaps, over time, the camera feels a bit more natural in your hand and the buttons and dials have become more intuitive and familiar.
Some of this may be completely intentional having stemmed from classes you have taken, workshops you attended or books that you may have read. A portion may just be from experimentation having failed, learned, re-attempting and succeeding on another try. Regardless of how your photography may have evolved, your photography has hopefully gotten better.
The growth may be entirely personal. Your willingness to try something different or it may be on the more technical side using the cameras settings to achieve a specific effect or look. Quite often the curiosity of trying a new technique is what spurs the growth of your photography and can reignite the passion for your craft and this is what will help make your photographs better.
Most photographers seem to need both aspects of the technical and creative artist to play off one another to see and evolution. You often see this play out when you get a new piece of gear or camera body now wondering with the new tech, how can you I do something different, imagining the possibilities.
“The technician needs the artist and the artist needs the technician to evolve. They are two sides of the same coin“
What you may find is that you gravitate toward one or the other, and that is fine as each compliments the other. Each of us use the given tools in a different way. These tools, the technical and the artistic, are the keys to evolution and provide us answers in creating new content helping us move forward in our photography. So, if I may, let me offer some advice on how to progress your evolution and keep your creative juices flowing.
Always keep learning
Nurture your curiosity. Go exploring on things you may not have tried or done before in your photography. This may be something like trying macro or astrophotography taking you out of your comfort zone, but that is a good thing because it is in moments like these that your creativity soars and the knowledge gap that may have existed becomes smaller promoting growth.
Challenge yourself
By nature, we are hardwired to solve problems. I would submit that having something pushing back against our creative endeavors causes us to look deeper at how to achieve this goals and that is healthy for our creative process. Challenges can come in many different forms. Perhaps it is something you are already doing and needs to be improved or, maybe it is something you envision and need to create for yourself. Either way, to evolve and grow, you need to challenge yourself.
This can be hard. Change is not something that most people readily welcome. This is what I think separates us a photographers from others. We are willing to look through the lens and see the world in different ways, not just the status quo.
I am a landscape, aviation and wildlife photographer. These are the genres that I was drawn to as they align with my interests and passions. How then could I evolve and change. By doing something different, out of my comfort zone and perhaps photographing new things.
Such was the case with these images. While on a recent family outing, mostly to photography wildlife and landscapes, I came across these patterns of light inside a local attraction. I am not sure why they drew my eye, but they did and I let my curiosity run, challenging myself to make an image. I like the abstract patterns each provided. I think the attraction was the color and shapes, something that I don’t always encounter in my normal work.
Most of us resist change, choosing to avoid it rather than chase it down. Change is unpredictable. It’s difficult to know what to do with that, but unless we’re willing to explore it, we’ll never move forward into it. For some, the struggle is to accept change; for others, the struggle is to accelerate it. Nurturing your curiosity, accepting and even chasing challenge, and re-evaluating your relationship with change.
Always keep learning and challenge yourself and you’ll move forward. Life, and your art, will also be so much more interesting and you will see how you have evolved as a photographer.
I would love to hear your comments and your journey’s challenges below in the comments.