What’s in store for 2017?
Happy New Year!
Past few months (year) I felt like I lost some of my creativity or maybe more to the point it went into hibernation. I let my daily work life take over and it became mundane. Get up early, go to work, fix this, file that, eat, sleep, look forward to the weekend. BLAHHH! Then this past summer I created a few side projects for myself and I started making time for photography. I re-discovered that my creativity is exactly what I need on a daily basis. And I have to, ‘I get to’ – make time for it; just like I have to make time for lunch or dinner. Sometimes, there’s a plan and sometimes it happens on a whim but I gotta do it. Photography makes me happy, it makes others happy, seriously, just how did I forget how much fun being creative is?
I started reading articles by David duChemin about finding your vision. I’m on week 8, 9? and the articles are inspiring and has me thinking about my craft. He talks about concepts and studying other artists and i’m enthralled with each article. There are points that stick out better than others, like “What do you love enough to spend your short life, or your limited free time, photographing?”. That’s easy, nature, the mountains, the forest, hiking, dogs, flowers, rivers, the Milky Way (stars, not the candy bar), flowing water… oops, maybe it isn’t that easy to narrow your focus afterall.
One suggestion from duChemin is to to take fewer photos or more specific, “…consider making fewer final photographs. I want you to consider demanding more from each final frame and being choosier about what you show to the world.“. I take hundreds of photos, probably closer to a few 1000 within a year. So this year I will be “choosier” with my final product. The first article in the series recommends looking through the last year of my ‘work’ and added some questions to ask myself as I work through this process. “What commonalities do you see in the work? What themes repeat themselves? Which images do you love? Why?” Here are a dozen that I chose for this first post of the new year.
The obvious theme here is nature and California landscapes (if you recognize some of the locations). I honestly have to say that I enjoy all of these shots. So much so that these are featured in my annual calendar. But, for me what made these special was the adventure to get these photos. Some of these adventures were on a whim, some were planned out, google searched potential locations and a few were simple walks along places I’ve been to hundreds of times. I’m gonna work on ‘conveying the adventure’ part, more on that later.
I look forward to 2017 and what it holds in photos, in adventures and reigniting my creativity.My goal, publish something weekly, so 52 weeks of cool imagery that I hope inspires you as much as it did me. Oh and for the following weeks, less writing, it’s really not my forte.
thanks for stopping by!
Kats
Snapshots by Kats 