 How's it, how's it, guys? Would you like to know the secret to creating amazing photographs without even trying? So many photographers struggle with this thing of trying to make great photographs all the time and falling short. Let's look at it in three steps. So without intent kind of means, you know, without any sort of real purpose. And a good example of this is when I went down to London a few years ago to photograph a friend of mine's launch in Soho. And I thought, well, I'll spend the day down in London and because I've never been to the Tate Museum, they'll take them on, right? And I thought, well, why not? So I got off the tube and I walked and just photographed whatever kind of struck my fancy. You know, without any sort of real purpose about creating street photography or urban stuff. And some of the photographs from that trip I feel are really good. Some of them are pretty pence, right? This picture of the pigeons. I don't know what that's all about, right? But the thing was that I wasn't really photographing with a specific intent. I was just wondering with my camera, just letting the city guide me and show me what it wanted to show me. Now you can do this wherever you are with any of your photographs, no matter what you want to photograph. I think with people you need, you know, if you have a studio station, because you wanna be professional, you know, their time, you can't just sit there and go, I'm gonna wait for creativity to strike, right? You need to have a little bit of a purpose with people. But everything else, take as much time as you need just to get into the flow and the mood of the place. To just photograph whatever tickles your fancy. And there's a reason why doing that is going to pay you dividends down the road. So take your camera, go somewhere and just let your instinct guide you to see where you're gonna end up. Overthinking something can be a death knell to your photography. There was a guy called Jack Absalom in the 80s in Australia. He's a gov into the out and back and paint pictures and stuff like that. But he really enjoyed showing people how to survive in the out back because their car broke down. And often he would contrive the situations, you're getting stuck in a sandbank or what have you. And the first thing he would do is I'm gonna just go off, let me make myself a cup of tea. It's just, because I want to, there's my favorite photograph of all time of mine, right? Is this picture here of my feet, reflected in a glass side thing at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. And if you haven't been to Edinburgh, you need to go because it's a great place to go and photograph. And all of these images were taken, just wondering around Edinburgh, again without any agenda. But this particular photograph of my feet was when I was in the Museum and I must have passed the stairwell a few times. And I kind of looked and go, well that's sort of interesting, but hadn't really thought about what could be there. And until the fourth or fifth time that I walked past, and then, oh, that's what I can do, right? Because my mind had had time to just think about it, rather than if I'd been sitting mulling over composition things and color balances, and depths and layering and communicating things. So I was just going back to basics, letting things just sit in my head. Now you can do this in your photography, by getting somewhere and just sitting. I've got the general scene or whatever, I've looked at it. If you set up a landscape, you know, a lot of photographers these days will set up a landscape and then they'll go shoot some B-roll for their YouTube channel. But what you could do is you set up a scene, you find something that's interesting, go off, have that cup of tea, have that cup of coffee, and then come back to the image, look at it, and go, okay, well that tree that I thought would be very handy for framing originally. Okay, it doesn't actually work, does it? Now that I'm looking at it, right? That's the problem that I was struggling with composition is now solved because I can see things with a fresh perspective. So take a break, photograph without intent, be prepared to step back from your photographs. Every now and again, just to let it just chill down. So again, you're letting it bubble up to the surface, all that creativity that is inside you. Then we start tapping in to the third part of creating these amazing pictures without too much effort. So I'm a big believer that there are two aspects to a photograph that make it successful and that is the ability for it to capture the viewer's attention and then also to hold it. Okay, now this is not an original concept but Roland Barthes has talked about this and I'm not gonna use the words because a lot of people haven't read Barthes and it just makes no sense, but the way that you capture somebody's attention is you know when you walk around a gallery and you see all these pictures and most of them just go, you know, you're not interested. But one or two, you're kind of like, ah, there's something about that, I like that. So you walk over to it and often you just kind of look at it and you go, mm, okay, and you move on. But every now and again, you also see something that then captures your attention but then holds it as well because you're seeing something more in the image. So relaxing, shooting without intent of, you know, not overthinking things taps into that first level because if you are photographing something that you have reacted to, that caught your attention and then the odds are that it's gonna catch somebody else's attention. So that's that benefit of being more lazy for want of a better word. With your photographs is that you're tapping into that magic that so many photographers miss because they're all about the second part. How many photographers have you met or listened to or heard who over-explained their photographs? They go, look, there's tiny little detail in the back. That's the kind of cool thing. That's what I was trying to showcase and stuff. It's like, well, if you need to give me a 10 page explanation about your photograph, I'm not gonna look at it. Sorry. It needs to reach out and say, look at me. See what I want to show you. So that's reacting to things. And then not overthinking means that you are starting to make an easier photograph because when you overthink things, as we were talking about earlier, it muddles the idea. You just, you know, be chill. We're under so much pressure in so many facets in our world today, you know, that photography is an outlet. It should be mindful. I'm also, you know, mindfulness and photography. It's a perfect mix. There's a video that I'll put on later about mindfulness, but you know, just calm down. This is supposed to be fun for you. You know, taking photographs is an outlet for creativity. If it's not working, if it's not flowing, it's okay to put the camera down and say I'm gonna back off for a little bit, right? I took about six months where I didn't take any pictures whatsoever. And that's fine because I came back rejuvenated. I came back excited. I came back with a fresh perspective, with a fresh enthusiasm for it, right? This is a journey for photography. You can't win art. There is no finish line, right? You are going to be creating photographs for as long as you want to. And the more that you back off a little bit, the more that you relax and just let it flow, the greater the chance of you getting photographs that not only are you proud of, the other people would go, wow, I dig that. And they're gonna say, how did you do that? And you go, like all great artists have been just happened. Oh, just, you know, just, you know, that's what we're aiming for, is that easy nonchalance as you take great pictures and people are just like, wow. So I mentioned earlier, you know, about the mindfulness in photography. And you'd like to find out more how to be relaxed and zen in your images. Then check out this video here. Once again, thank you ever so much for watching and I'll see you again soon.