2 Photography Approaches For Those In A Creative Rut

In today’s post I’m talking about two photography approaches you can implement when you’re feeling like your photography has become a bit stale or you’re in need of mixing things up in order to find new photos.

Now and again, I’ll get a comment on YouTube that will say something along the lines of, "I’ve been in a bit of a photography rut and this video helped," or "I need to get back out there and start experimenting with my camera again and this gave me some inspiration," etc. I love those comments because that means even if my video gets a hundred views, it helped somebody slightly, and that is very much what drove today’s topic.

Photograph What You Don't Expect to See

The first thing I think you should do if your photography is feeling a bit boring or you’re struggling to find new styles of images is to photograph what you don't expect to see at a place.

Often when we go out to do photography and we go to a certain area, there are preconceived ideas in our head of how we can come away with good photos, and this is normally based off what’s worked for us in the past.

For example, if I go to the beach, I already know I can hang around on the sandbanks and shoot silhouettes of people walking along the sand with the ocean in the background, and if I do that, I will more than likely come away with a good photo.

I love taking those types of images, but if that’s all I do every time I go to the coast, the images won't surprise me anymore. I won't come back and feel like I’ve got something different or learnt something new, and I think that in some ways is a fast track to boredom with photography.

It’s best in my opinion to try and break that, and by simply looking for something different, it can change what you find.

In order to create something new and different, we have to tell ourselves to reject our first and most obvious idea that we already know will get us a good image, because we've done it in that location before. Instead, look for the stuff we didn't expect to be photographing at all.

So, with that in mind, if I put myself back at the beach and ignore the sandbanks, and force myself to go looking for things I never expected to be taking a photo of when I set off to go to the beach, I think that is one of the strongest ways to keep taking new, unique, and different photos, and in turn, learning more.

Photograph a Feeling

The second thing I would do is photograph a feeling. Well actually, I haven’t done this myself for a long time, but it used to drive like 90% of my photography a few years ago. And I should probably give it a go again soon.

Before you even pick up your camera, decide on a feeling you want to capture. For example, "Today, I want to photograph loneliness." Then, as you walk around and look for loneliness, you'll hopefully start noticing and photographing things you might otherwise overlook, or at the very least, if you try, you can somehow mould that feeling into photos.

Loneliness could be a dead tree, empty benches, one sheep in a field, one street light on a road. The playground is yours with this one.

This is the opposite to the more common way of shooting, which is reacting to emotions we stumble upon (for example, we might stumble across a moment that makes us laugh or smile and take a photo of it after feeling that emotion). But doing the reverse and telling yourself beforehand that you’re going to photograph a certain feeling forces you to look at everything completely differently, and almost create images rather than react to images. Which, I think at least, does absolute wonders for your creativity.

You know how when you get a new car, you think not many people have the same car as you, but then you start noticing the same car everywhere. It's not that there are suddenly more of those cars on the road; it's simply that your awareness of them has increased. Your brain has essentially been told to spot them.

I think photography is a bit like that. When you’re hyper-aware of a certain style of photo that works and you're good at executing it, we are likely to see or gravitate towards that type of photo everywhere. Which isn't a bad thing by any means, but if you are wanting to mix it up, notice new things, take new styles of photos, you definitely have to consciously avoid noticing the same car.