 So, how do you keep yourself motivated in photography over the years, especially when you know that it is a hobby and not your profession? Photography is like most art forms and it should be pursued because you enjoy it. But occasionally, you know, you can find yourself in a rut. There are roadblocks that get in your way to freely and easily enjoying your photography. This is last weekend while I was trying to recover from attending two birthday parties for toddlers on the same day. I was scrolling through Reddit and I came across this thread by a user called SandyMartin07 and if you watch the channel, Sandy has it, right? So this is kind of what they wrote, over the recent years I have fallen in love with landscape photography more and more and my passion for backpacking and some good luck has helped me get some good images on quite a few trips. However, in the last few years, I haven't been able to travel as much due to the thing we don't talk about and other things, so that motivation in my photography has been fading. Additionally, I rarely get any appreciation from my social circle for the photographs that I take and I share at times on social media and I feel hardly anyone recognises the effort that went into making one image. Now I realise fully that social media shares should never be the objective of photography as we do it for our own gratification and our willingness to freeze that moment in front of us. However, it does feel nice when people recognise your effort even to a small extent and it adds to your motivation to try even better next time. So how do you keep yourself motivated in photography over the years, especially when you know that it is a hobby and not your profession? In that thread, there were some really useful suggestions and in particular one jumped out of me straight away and because it's really something that isn't often suggested as an idea about starting to be motivated in photography and that's actually printing your photographs. These days, of course, the majority of our images end up simply as representations on a screen and for genres like landscape photographs, seeing your image as like a little 12 inch picture on the screen is totally different to seeing it as a gorgeous 40 inch print up on your wall. And so I think you need to have your images printed at some point in a larger format. So I don't mean like an 8x10 or something, but something that is suited to the genre because it gives you a whole different perspective to your photographs. You know, once you see them that size, you're going to start to connect with them, to interact with them and to see them in a completely different way, even though that you took them. So print out some of your work, you know, and if you're feeling like you don't have the motivation to go out and actually take photographs, go through your archives, choose some images that you think will look great on your wall and revisit them, reprocess them, do a proper processing on them because there's nothing quite, nothing quite as breathtaking as seeing your photographs as wonderfully printed like C type images that are gorgeously presented on the wall. Now, obviously your C types are kind of pricey, but if you can't afford a C type, then just you know, think about something a little bit off center, you're gonna have to compromise on quality just a little bit. But even something like this, this is a project or not probably, this is an option that I had at the studio. So this is what's called a foam export, he says, trying to not get in the wall. And that's 30 by 20. And it didn't cost me very much. I think those back in the day probably like, you know, 20 pounds, 30 pounds, if something like that. And of course, the beauty of that is that you don't have to actually frame it. It can go on to the wall as is. So even if it's something like that, we're sure, okay, appreciate the image qualities can be a bit lower, but print it out man, see, see what your works like big, don't just be content with just, you know, the little screen, do it and see what happens. Of course, if you have a body of work, then you could possibly think about having an exhibition or something. There are loads of places around where you could probably rent some more space or some gallery time. For example, there's a place near me, I think, you know, back in, I say back in the day again, this was a sort of thing, and you know, I think it was like 50 pounds for a week or something like that. Do it. Is it going to give you an idea that you have something to actually do with your photographs? That idea of having something to do with your photos is probably why I feel a lot of people struggle with feeling constantly motivated in photography. Because often, there isn't really an end result. And this is especially true for people from whom photography is simply a hobby. In the past, this affected me a whole heap, especially after I'd left further school where I had gone from an environment where people were constantly giving me work to do, the end of assignments. So there was a goal to being into a real world where this is before I was working properly as a photographer, where I didn't really have an aim. So I was kind of aimless. And the more that I stayed being aimless, the more the motivation kind of slipped away a little bit to take photographs. So what I should have done is to look at creating a project, you know, something to give my photography purpose and for me to work as a goal. This is hardly revolutionary, however, I feel that a lot of people, they bite off more than they can chew. So like the 365 project is a prime example of this, you know, that's I'm going to take a photograph every day for an entire year. And you know, I think that's a real problem. If you're lacking motivation, taking on a project that is going to require an entire year to complete is too much. It's a huge commitment. You know, what, you're going to take a picture every single day. If you're not motivated to take one now, do you think after 365 days you're going to feel even more motivated? No, it's going to be a chore. And it's something you're going to do just because you're supposed to do it. And ultimately, you know, photography should be fine. You should you should take photographs because you want to, you know. And so rather than, you know, biting off this massive project, which ultimately doesn't really, I don't think, help you improve very much, you are going to, I think, do better if you find a project that is challenging and it needs to be challenging, but also has a short lifespan that you can do it reasonably quickly and and a bit of it's a process that you can do again and again. So this is kind of what you want to do in. And I found that there are two exercises that are extremely beneficial with this. And certainly have helped my photography in the past and and I have talked about them in the learning to see course, but if you've not signed up for that, I'll just talk about briefly here. So there's the 36 frames project and the alphabet exercise. So the 36 frames is that you can take anything, any sort of subject that you want and photograph it in 36 completely different ways. The reason which is 36 is because that was a role of film. 12 is too easy. You know, 24 is kind of is a bit hard, but 36, 36 completely different ways of photograph in the same object is going to challenge you. It is going to be hard, but it's not going to require your commitment of a year. So when you have this thing, you focus on that one tiny thing. It forces you, it forces you so strongly to think about the ways that you can photograph it and take you in directions that you may not have normally thought about and pushes you to explore all the tools in your photographic arsenal, if you if you will. Now, I did earlier last year, I did a video about this 36 frames project in in in more depth than the whole video. And the response that was was absolutely fantastic. It was great to see the positive feedback and the impact that it had on challenging people to improve their photography. And I'll link to the video at the end of this, if you're interested to go and check it out. The other episode, the other episode, the other exercise is the alphabet exercise, which is about finding letters that occur naturally in the world around us. You may have done something similar at some point. You can, over the course of a weekend, collect letters in photographs, much like, you know, a printer would, you know, there's little wooden blocks that they used to put into printing trades. And if you do that, then you can start spelling out words. You can spell your name and, you know, your wife's name, your kid's name, lots of stuff. Now, that might feel just it's a little bit cheeseball, isn't it? But so what, you know, this is this is the whole point is that these are simply exercises. You know, you're not going to go to the flea market and start selling all those prints that you see, you know, but you're training your eyes. This is a vital thing to train your eyes to see the world in a different photographic way than just blindly accepting what is in front of you. And, you know, it may just take you out of your comfort zone. You may feel a bit silly by doing it, but it's going to help you to remember that there is opportunity around you everywhere you look. Going back to basics is probably one of the greatest ways of rediscovering motivation within your photography. You know, when you first picked up a camera, you weren't really too concerned about the technical things or, you know, you weren't trying to achieve perfection or polish off all the rough edges on your photography. You were simply you embraced the notion of pointing your camera at something and just getting a picture back. It was that simple. In 2002, I still had my film camera and I was I was coming up against technical perfection on online, you know, in the early digital environment. And I was seeing a lot of that early digital work that look it looked polished and it looked professional, I suppose, in a way that my efforts on film didn't for some reason. I felt that because I didn't have access to those high power digital high power into the digital cameras and computers do actual, you know, online, not online, you know, actual Photoshop processing and why have you that I felt somewhat disinclined to be taking photographs because I didn't think that they would be up to snuff or at least I didn't think they would be up to wear. I thought those should be. In those days, I was involved on a website called Deviant Art and I was talking to this young lady and she said that her art teacher had told her to go and buy a camera called a Holger, which she had to go and purchase from Hong Kong. And this plastic camera had basically no settings. It was shoddily put together. It had light leaks. You need a gaffer tape to hold the thing actually together. The film didn't sit flat, you know, and there was, you know, guesstimation focusing and you sucked an exposure out of your thumb. But she showed me the images that she had taken with this camera and I was immediately I was excited about it. So I rushed off and I went online and I tried to find a Holger. And eventually I found one, you know, I had to get all again also from Hong Kong, because this was before the craze for toy cameras really got going. So it was quite actually quite difficult to get hold of one. And this is this is the boy here. I mean, I don't often show here on the channel. But yeah, this is the little Holger. This revolutionized a lot of the way that I looked at photography. Anyway, so, you know, I got myself some 120 film and I loaded it up and it was like it was like the brakes had been lifted or a weight and the weight had been taken off of my shoulders and that I was photographing without any concern for technical perfection or the right exposure or is this focus correct? Because none of those things were under my control with this piece of plastic. All of this got me back to the idea of photographing with the simple pleasure that I did as a child and it re-kicked start my photography. And in fact, I can still see the echoes of what happened then in Edinburgh with my photographs that are lingering in my style to this day. So that's like 20 years later. So, you know, that's kind of the thing that I think ultimately is a heart of this. If you're not having fun, you need to find ways to kind of reinvigorate having fun in your photographs. And as one of the posters did say on Reddit, we get so wrapped up with this idea that we want people to recognize the efforts that we put in that we kind of focus too much on that because no one is going to care about the effort that you put in to your photographs. They don't care that if you used a holger to take a picture or that if you got as there was an article in F-stoppers up into some sort of, you know, one of those paraglider things to a 4,000 foot thing so you could get a unique photograph that nobody's ever seen. Does that make the picture any better than the one that you take with a piece of plastic? I have certainly never heard of anybody looking at photographs or lusting over the images because of the effort that the photographer put in. People respond to the visual things in the photographs and the things that you put there that make them feel something. Going back to those basics is just a great way of removing all the shackles that we get lumbered with. Go and do something, do something that is so basic, so simple, you know, shoot with a 50mm lens, shoot with a piece of cardboard taped over your preview screen so you can't see what your image looks like, what if the exposure is correct or any sort of stuff. Just let the camera do its thing. Just concentrate on the image itself on what's in front of you rather than all the technical gubbins that goes around it. See what happened? Experiment and just, you know, have fun, man. The poster, you know, they mentioned that they also enjoy the chance to travel and to take photographs and because they only did once, you know, a couple of times a year, that they took a long time to make sure they got the right pictures when they were there and they haven't mentioned it in their post but one of the things is that there's a roadblock there. There's a couple of things that they have mentioned that tell me that they are subconsciously sort of sabotaging their motivation because they're looking at this from an idea that there need to be certain things in place, that there need to be criteria that have been met before you can take a photograph and in this OPs, in the posters case, it was kind of, I'm going to the mountains, I need to go to the landscape. So think about your own photography, think about where you traditionally take photographs or you feel comfortable taking photographs. If you're outside of that, what's holding you back? What is the roadblock that you might not be aware of that is bursting your bubble of motivation? Now, if you are a landscape photographer, you may feel that you need to go somewhere that landscape photography is traditionally taken to work as a landscape photographer. But I'd like you to think about two famous Adamses, Ansel and Robert. Both of them took landscape photography and in extremely different styles and they did travel to go to their respective landscape photos, but you know, and so Adams went to places like Yosemite in New Mexico and Robert Adams stayed in local urban areas, you know, close to him in Colorado. It's an interesting thought to imagine how if you transplanted one Adams for the other, how they would have reacted, how they would have photographed each other's respective sort of patch as it were. So I think you need to kind of think about how you can combat the idea of the roadblocks that are setting up in front of us, that if we're not in our native photographic habitat, then we can't photograph things. So possibly one of the best ways to do that is to throw out a convention, throw out all these preconceived ideas about what we photograph in genres. I have a book about road trip photography in America and there were two photographers in there who created a road trip on bedsheets. You know, they've taken the sheets and they photographed them like some sort of mythical landscape of the American West that feels like a road and all of this without leaving a room. So mix things up, photograph things in different ways. And if you're not able to get to the mountains, then photograph a tree in your backyard and you know, like as a portrait. Just mix up your vocabulary and see what happens. Just change things around. That 36 frame challenge is a fantastic way to improve your photography. And I've linked to the video here, which talks about it in more depth. You're gonna go and check it out right now, aren't you? Because I've been waving my finger at it. Anyway, thank you ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon.