Just A Man With A Camera

When I decided I was going to pick up my camera again and start shooting on a regular basis, I decided that I may need to take some sort of a back to basics kind of approach.  When you don’t know what to shoot or are feeling burnt out, you’ll often end up telling yourself something along the lines of “I would pick up my camera, but there’s just nothing to shoot”.  When really, maybe you should be saying “I can’t think of anything I would enjoy shooting”.  There is a whole wide world out there to photograph.  There’s far from nothing out there to take pictures of.  Sometimes you need to revisit a subject you gave up on a long time ago because it doesn’t interest you anymore, or you thought it was played out.  I had that frame of mind about photographing flowers. 

Yes there are a billion photos of flowers on the internet. Frankly, I don't particularly like looking at photos of flowers. I have flowers in my yard, but they are kind of just for my wife and the bees to enjoy. But this is about working on honing skills. So I need to open myself up to photographing things that I may have thought were boring, mundane, or played out.  Where I’m at right now, I feel like I just need to get my reps in.  Besides, it’s been so long since I was photographing something other than my action figure collection (there will be plenty more of that in future posts, don’t worry about that), that anything outside if that is kind of outside of my comfort zone.

So a few weeks ago when my mom was in town visiting, we did a family trip to the local flower conservatory.  It was something different, that none of us had been to, and a good excuse for me to take my camera out of the house and get out of that comfort zone.  Even though I was still kind of in a “flowers are boring, I guess I’ll just do this to say I tried” headspace, I found myself pleasantly surprised with the results.  I didn’t try to do anything revolutionary.  I just tried to focus on composition, exposure, you know: back to basics.  What kind of caught me by surprise was how not boring it was, and the variety of subjects there were.  I’m sure this sounds painfully obvious, but in my head I was saying a “flower is a flower is a flower”. But when you stop and think about it for more than two seconds you realise, it’s an excellent location to work some photography muscles.  There’s opportunity for macro work, to make bright colours pop, to work on isolating the head of one single flower to accentuate it with a shallow depth of field.  Now I really understand why people who taught classes out of the camera store I used to work at would do field trips there.

I’m not saying that I’ll be coming back here regularly.  Heck, I might not come back for a few years.  But it’s a solid reminder that there are photographic opportunities all around us if we can just get out of our heads and not worry about what we think is boring, and take a step out of what we are used to.  It may not be the most exciting content, and I may never look at these again, but it was a worthwhile exercise and felt like a step in the right direction for me.