I used to believe my photography time was precious, which meant every outing had to count. If I couldn’t imagine the shot I wanted before leaving the house, I’d stay home, because why bother. Better to do nothing than to waste time making nothing good.
But I eventually realised that this was killing the fun and wasting my photography. It was pointless pressure to perform disguised as efficiency.
Here was my logic: limited time plus uncertain outcome equals wasted effort. I didn’t want to spend a morning taking photos if I wasn’t fairly sure I’d have at the end something I like. Therefore, if I didn’t know what I wanted or I didn’t know where to get it, I’d stay home and do something else.
The problem with that mindset is that experimentation becomes a luxury and luxury is the first thing that gets cut when pressure is applied. Worse, some experiments take time and if they don’t get anywhere, it’s lost time where I could have produced something better.
Let me give you an example: it took me years to finally experiment with film photography. I had never done it before, I didn’t know anything about it, I didn’t know anyone who was doing it. It was a complete unknown and I couldn’t justify investing time into it to potentially fail. In fact, it took me realising that my approach was completely wrong after years on pause to decide that I could spend time doing something that had no guaranteed outcome.
The irony is obvious now: I was protecting my photography time by not doing photography.
I have now learned that my thinking was backward: you need to waste time, to fail, to get nowhere to learn. You need those days where you go out and come back with nothing. It’s not wasted time, you’ve learned things during that time, even if you didn’t produce an object you like. The pressure to deliver every time you use your camera isn’t protecting your craft, it’s strangling it.
Photography isn’t a manufacturing process where efficiency and output are the primary metrics. Ina way, it’s closer to research where you have ideas, you make hypotheses, you test them, tweak them, run experiments, and learn from the results. Most of the work leads nowhere because you have the wrong hypothesis, or your experiment isn’t adequate. When you start, you don’t know if you’ll succeed.
What is important is to make space for questions: What happens if I shoot this way? What’s down that street? What if I tried a different genre? What if I aim for messiness instead of order and polish? What is that setting creating gritty images? Do I like it? What if I imitate that photographer’s style or themes?
The cost is that although these questions lead somewhere, it might not be with an instant payoff. And social media where at first glance it appears that everyone always gets things done, that every photographer knows what they’re doing and delivers every single time, where there is no room for failure unless it’s turned into clickbait, compounds that pressure to deliver immediately.
In reality, nobody is waiting for your photographs. Nobody cares if you spent three hours walking and came back with an empty memory card. Nobody cares that you produce two photos you dared show to anyone lase year. The only person applying that pressure is you, and you can stop at any time. Once you do, you feel an impression of lightness, a more exploratory mood, a sense of honesty.
The change isn’t about valuing your time less. Your time is always precious. It’s about understanding that the value isn’t measured in keeper images per hour. Some of the most useful days I’ve had with a camera have produced nothing good I’d show anyone. They were still necessary. That’s how I learned that I hate the 50mm focal length but I love my TLR; that’s I discovered that I can’t stand street photography, but I like urban photography; that’s how I discovered that I think of landscapes as portrait orientated images with a journey from bottom foreground to top background, but I love the square format for everything else.
Read the book “Magnum contact sheets”. It clearly shows that even the most memorable photos are drowning in a sea of failures. That even the rare contact sheets that hold a great photo contain many that are discarded and that you never knew about. And these sheets are surrounded by many more that don’t contain anything judged good enough to even include in the book. But they show you that the great Magnum photographers worked each scene, tried things, and failed. They just didn’t feel the need to turn it into clickbait.
Stop performing for yourself. Go out when the conditions are suitable, even if you don’t have a plan. Waste a morning. Try something that might not work. Photography doesn’t require you to deliver. It requires you to show up.
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