Court (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to The Wild Photographer. Today's episode is about something that probably happens to almost every photographer at some point. Photography, just simply put, isn't quite as fun as it used to be. And I hesitate saying that too dramatically because
Maybe it's not that you're burned out. Maybe you still absolutely love photography, but maybe it's just gotten a little bit more complicated and there's something a little bit less whimsical and fun and creative and artistic about it. Maybe every photograph starts feeling like it needs to be portfolio worthy and useful in some sort of way. I I get myself in that rut often. Or maybe every time you go somewhere beautiful, you're thinking more about the lenses and settings and social media and posting and editing, even if you're just in front of a beautiful place that you've never seen before.
Or maybe you've just gotten good enough at photography that some of the mystery has disappeared. I distinctly remember when I was first getting into photography, everything was exciting. Changing the aperture was exciting. Getting a new lens was exciting. Getting that beautiful background blur was exciting. Taking a silky water effect photo was amazing. you, you know, just day to day you discover some new technique and think, my gosh, look at what this camera can do. Look at what I'm able to do now.
And then eventually you know what aperture does and you know how to make it work for you. You know how to blur water. You've photographed sunsets like thousands of times. And photography can slowly shift from this artistic exploration a little bit more into execution. And you have pressures and deadlines, and maybe just your creativity is waning a little bit. You're no longer asking what happens if I do this. You're asking how do I get the photograph I already know how to make? Your expectations go higher.
And these are very, very different mindsets.
So today I want to talk about ways to inject some of that curiosity and that fun, that playfulness back into photography. This is not necessarily how to take better photographs. In fact, that's truly not what I'm getting at in these various topics in today's.
episode. But that's kind of the point. This episode's really about how to enjoy taking photographs more. and interestingly, I think the two often go together is not putting that pressure on you, being more playful, and just ultimately enjoying your photography more.
Before I get into the episode, I want to quickly mention that I do have other photo resources out there. If you've not stumbled upon my YouTube channel, I'm really cranking out lot of videos on all sorts of how-to things with photography, like editing, post-processing, techniques, Even travel vlog style photo videos. So I'm pretty stoked on it. If you'd like to check it out, you can just go on YouTube and search Court Whelan and photography or something like that, and you'll
Definitely find my account. There aren't a whole lot of Court Whelans out there. But anyway, I digress. Check out my YouTube channel. Lots more going on there and more to come.
So the first topic is simplify. My first suggestion is really probably the easiest one. Just take less gear with you. And I realize that's kind of amusing and ironic coming from someone who has spent a large percentage of his career talking about photographic gear. And I am a gear nerd. I love lenses. I love cameras.
I love clever little photography accessories, but sometimes having too much equipment actually makes photography worse. Not technically worse, but mentally worse. Because every extra lens introduces and injects another decision to make. Do I use
the 24 to 105?
Should I switch to the ultra-wide? Would this be better compressed with a telephoto? Should I put a polarizer on? Should I take the polarizer off? Maybe I should grab a second camera body. And instead of looking at what's
Just directly in front of you, you're basically managing inventory. So try deliberately limiting yourself. a saying that I like to quote often is constraint is the mother of creativity. Take one lens, take one camera, that's it. Go out for two hours with just a nifty-50, a 50 millimeter lens. Or take a 24 to 105 and decide you're just not allowed to change lenses. You're gonna have to see and photograph the world through that lens.
Or take your big old wildlife lens and photograph absolutely everything with it, including landscapes, including people, including flowers and macro shots. Constraints are incredibly powerful when it comes to creativity. When you have every option available to you, like your whole camera bag, your whole camera kit, you tend to make the obvious choice. And that's kind of an underlying theme of this episode today: is getting you away from some of those choices and especially the obvious ones. When you remove options, your brain
has to, well, start solving problems. And that's where the creativity comes in. Things that you might not know you were going to think about all of a sudden start percolating in your mind. If I only have a 50 millimeter lens and there's this giant landscape in front of me, now I have to move. I have to move back. I have to look at it differently. I have to find layers. I have to find a foreground. I might have to stitch a panorama. I might shoot vertically into a panorama with several shots from left to right or right to left.
I'm interacting with a scene instead of simply selecting the correct tool.
there's another nice side benefit here. You're carrying less stuff. I know that's not particularly profound, but walking around with one camera is just pleasant and fun in its own right. You're not constantly rearranging straps and digging around in a backpack. You just photograph.
The next thing I really like is creating a tiny photography assignment for myself. and importantly, make it weirdly specific. Don't go out and say, I'm gonna photograph nature. That's not an assignment. That's just what we do. It's very, very general. Instead, give yourself an assignment like, I'm only gonna photograph shadows today. I'm only gonna photograph the color blue or red. It's gonna get that creative side of your brain really, really kicked into gear. Maybe you're gonna go out and look for
reflections to photograph. maybe you're gonna go out and photograph things that are in motion and use slow shutter all the time. gonna go photograph textures and patterns and nature. Or maybe I'm gonna go photograph wildlife habitat without actually even looking for or showcasing the wildlife itself. It's just their home. It's it's their natural area. Suddenly you're looking at what might be a very familiar place and very familiar way of looking at it quite differently.
This is one of the best ways I know to photograph somewhere you've actually been, you know, hundreds of times, like in your own backyard, in your own city park. Because that's another challenge. We photographers tend to think we need new destinations to create new photographs. And obviously, I'm a huge fan of going to new places and seeing new things. It's it's pleasurable in its own right. But creativity and novelty are not exactly the same thing. Cause sometimes the creative challenge is finding something new in a place or in a scene that isn't new. And not only is this just gonna
add to the fun of it all, it's actually probably gonna improve you as a photographer in general. Go to your local park and decide you're only photographing at ground level all day or for the hour that you're out there. Like don't photograph anything higher than a foot from the ground or a a third of a meter for my international listeners. That alone will completely change what you see out in the place that you're photographing. Or maybe photograph an entire outing at just one focal length. Even if you don't have a fixed lens, you don't put a nifty 50 on.
you're shooting with your 24 to 105. Make it fixed. Like don't change the dial. Shoot at 35 millimeter the whole day. That's actually a really great one to set in. It's what most people believe is what the eye naturally sees. So go out and shoot at 35 millimeter in streets, in parks, in nature, wherever you might find yourself. It's a really, really fun, creative, and kind of new thing to do.
Or maybe you go out and photograph details instead of big vistas. Sidestep that big view if you're going on a hike and just start photographing the texture of rocks or the texture of tree trunks. You could even do something a little bit silly like take exactly 24 photos, no more, no less. make it like you have a roll of film and you can only shoot 24.
or decide to make a photo essay with exactly five photos. Jason Edwards mentioned this when he's judging contests and giving photo assignments to his classes. He says, make a photo essay with exactly five photos. No more, no less.
And what you'll realize is you become much more intentional with this constraint of the volume of photos. And honestly, it can be a lot of fun.
I love this next one. Make photos you do not intend to share. take photographs that you have absolutely no intention of showing anybody. Don't post them, don't send to your photography friends. Don't wonder whether they'll perform well on Instagram. Don't even necessarily edit them, perhaps. Make photographs simply because you want to see what happens. This is where that playful curiosity comes in.
I think there's a weird thing that happens once photography becomes part of your professional life or even just part of your kind of identity. Every photo starts feeling like a tiny little product or a project. Is this one good enough? Will somebody like this? Is this something I would put on a website or would I print it? Would this do well on social media? and that is unfortunately a very effective way to suck the joy out of experimentation.
Because experimentation requires trial and error, requires failure. It requires sometimes making bad or just even ugly photographs. It requires trying something where you don't know what the result is gonna be. And if every frame is being evaluated as a you know finished piece of art, you stop that experimentation process and you you don't go, you don't lean into the risk. So give yourself permission to photograph weird stuff. Drag the shutter while you're walking and make a blurred photo.
Photograph directly into the sun. You know, start thinking about breaking these traditional rules, whether it's an actual written-down rule or just a rule you have in your head. Shoot through the grass, try some intentional camera movement, put something blurry in the foreground, or just shoot at a really high ISO to see what happens. Part of this is just adding that curiosity and fun, but in a way it actually makes you a more developed photographer as well. Make a photograph that technically violates everything you're quote unquote supposed to do.
And don't worry about whether it's good. Just see if it's interesting.
Another really simple way to make photography feel fresh and new and exciting is to deliberately break your own habits. We all develop a style, which is good, it's great, but style can become a routine. Maybe you always photograph wildlife with a long lens and that creamy, blurred background. That's great. But now try photographing wildlife really small in the frame. Maybe you always photograph landscapes at a very wide angle. Put the 400 millimeter on.
Maybe you always shoot at the biggest aperture, aka smallest F number you can with whatever lens you have. Spend an afternoon shooting at F eleven or at even F sixteen. Perhaps you always freeze motion. Go the opposite direction.
Put your shutter at a 50th of a second and start photographing moving animals. It could be squirrels, it could be birds, it doesn't have to be big African safari wildlife. Just try new different things. You will probably ruin a lot of photographs, especially with this slow shutter, but you may also make something completely different. And one of my favorite examples is photographing wildlife with slow shutter speeds. Normally, if I'm photographing a bird flying past me or flitting on a branch, I'm, you know, usually somewhere around one over 1250 or one two thousandth of a second.
Cause I want everything tacked sharp. But what happens if I photograph that bird at a 30th of a second and maybe even move as I'm keeping that shutter open, a sort of pan with the movement of the animal? Most frames will probably be pretty messy and that's okay. But every once in a while, the head or the eye will be relatively sharp and the wings and background will kind of smear into these beautiful lines of motion. All of a sudden you have a photograph that feels completely different from the thousand plus sharp bird photos you've taken over the years. And that is just fun.
Next one, learn one new thing before you go out on your next photo walk or your next photo outing. another trap that photographers often fall into is we we think we need a whole new genre to get excited again. Like I need to get into macrophotography or astrophotography. I need to learn how to do flash photography out with wildflowers, or maybe I should buy a drone. But oftentimes you just need one new skill and pick something small. Don't
Don't go for like the biggest possible option out there. Learn little things like maybe focus stacking. Learn how to shoot panoramas really well and really quickly. Maybe practice and learn intentional camera movement, the idea that you're actually moving your camera while the shutter is open. Learn how to photograph stars. Learn how to
use exposure bracketing properly. Heck, learn macro. Try black and white photography.
The point isn't mastery right off the bat. The point is getting back into what I would call like a beginner mode. Because beginner mode is fantastic for making photography fun again. And it's it's just really a whole new world of opportunities. Beginner mode is also full of questions. Why did this happen when I did this? What if I change this? Why is this blurry? Why did this actually turn out to be very, very sharp? What happens if I double or have the shutter speed? And suddenly photography feels like a discovery again instead of just kind of like a performance act.
Personally, I think learning something that's just outside your normal photography is really, really useful. if you're primarily a wildlife photographer, try architecture, like buildings for an afternoon. Walk city streets and photograph structures. If you're a landscape photographer, maybe try street photography, candid photography. If you're a travel photographer first and foremost, spend an hour just doing nothing but photographing insects.
Or wildflowers,
You're forcing your photographic brain to solve completely different problems and see scenes in a very different way. And that's what this is all about.
All right, quick break here because I want to thank one of the sponsors of the show, MPB. And I really want to talk about something that every photographer bumps into sooner than later. It's that moment when you start eyeing your next piece of gear, or you have extra gear just kind of sitting around. Maybe your style is evolving, maybe a lens isn't pulling its weight anymore, or maybe you've just got your eye on something new for an upcoming trip.
Whatever it is, that upgrade cycle is a very real thing, and this is exactly where MPB comes in. MPB is hands down one of the easiest ways I've found to buy, sell, or trade camera gear without the usual hassle. And the big thing for me here is trust. You're not rolling the dice on some random listing. Every item is carefully inspected, it's tested, and it's even photographed individually for their website. So what you see is exactly what shows up at your door. Plus, there is a warranty and very easy returns.
On the flip side, if you do have too much gear or if you've got gear just sitting around on their shelf collecting dust, MPB makes selling ridiculously simple as well. You get a quote very fast, like instantaneous, and you ship it off with free insured shipping. And once they check it out, you get paid directly to your bank account. No back and forth, no meetups,
no guesswork.
So whether you're upgrading your kit, simplifying what you carry, nod to this episode, or just turning old gear into funds for your next adventure, MPB is absolutely worth checking out. Buy, sell, or trade, and keep on doing what you love. All right, let's get back into it.
next topic on how to make photography fun, parentheses again, is stop chasing perfect conditions. And this is a big one. Sometimes experienced photographers become a little bit too discerning and too particular because, well, we have seen and experienced a lot. we know what good light looks like. We know where the sun should be for this type of photo. We know when the weather is mediocre or it's just flat and uninteresting.
And that's of course very valuable, But it also means we start kind of taking ourselves out of photography, meaning we're not going out to photograph if we don't deem the conditions are great for photography. it might be bad light, it might be a boring sky, windy, cloudy, the wildlife isn't doing anything. And pretty soon you're only willing to photograph during the best, you know, seven minutes of the day.
But remember, beginners don't do that. Beginners photograph everything because it's new and it's it's exciting. And while that may not always produce really brilliant high-level work, there is something really wonderful about just that sheer enthusiasm. So occasionally ignore your own standards and wish list when it comes to what the environment's doing for the day or what the conditions are like. Go out in crummy light, like harsh midday sun.
Photograph in the rain, you know, photograph at noon, photograph in foggy conditions, just ugly weather. Instead of asking, are these good photography conditions for the day? Instead ask what kind of photography do these conditions allow? Harsh midday sunlight might be terrible for a soft wildlife portrait. Okay, I get that, been there, done that. But maybe it's fantastic for black and white photography. Maybe it's delivering really extreme high contrast, something new, something different, something that you don't normally photograph a lot of.
Maybe you photograph the shadows or find reflections like I mentioned before. when you stop fighting the conditions, you can start responding to them. And that's a much more creative mindset.
Next up, spend more time and take fewer photos. I know it's crazy. In this digital world where we can rapid fire off 200 photos in a handful of seconds, it seems like the antithesis of what this new tech is allowing us to do. But I do recommend, again, with the understanding and the idea of making photography fun again, just slowing down. And this sounds very contradictory, I know, because modern cameras allow us to photograph incredibly quickly and at incredible volumes with not a ton of downside, other than that.
Time it takes to go through them all, but that doesn't mean we always should take lots of photographs. Pick one subject and stay with it. Learn to photograph it in a dozen, two dozen different ways. Just one tree, one bird, one viewpoint or landscape, maybe one street corner or alleyway, one single flower, and give yourself a little bit of a time limit. Give yourself 15, 20 minutes. Initially you'll make the obvious photograph, okay? And then there's another obvious photograph, but then
Pretty soon, within that 15-20 minutes, you'll start running out of obvious photographs. And that's when things hopefully get fun and interesting. You walk around it, you circle around the tree, you crouch down and try to get underneath the flower. You put something in the foreground. You might change lenses. You you might wait for better or different light.
You notice some tiny detail you didn't see before after 10 minutes. A lot of creativity happens after you've exhausted your first idea or first couple of ideas. But if you take three photographs and move on, you'll never get there. You'll never kind of push that creative barrier. And I think that towing that line is where photography can really, really get fun again. And this is particularly true with wildlife. Sometimes I'll watch someone photograph an animal for about 30 seconds and then lower the camera because they've quote unquote got it.
But what does got it mean? You know, what what does that little checkbox really look like? You've got a photograph of an elephant standing there. Okay, great. Now watch the elephant. You know, insert squirrel. Maybe maybe we're not all photographing elephants all day, every day, but maybe the elephant starts doing something different. Maybe it starts dusting itself or it looks around. Maybe another elephant approaches or the light changes, it peeks out of a cloud or goes behind a cloud.
Maybe the elephant or squirrel walks towards a really interesting tree with cool shadows. Maybe it turns sideways and all of a sudden the composition is dramatically better. photography gets more rewarding when it becomes observation rather than just collection.
Next up, print something. It's very old fashioned idea, but print your photographs. Seriously.
One of the weird things about digital photography is that we have this ability to take more photos and better photos all the time. And we produce tens of thousands of images that almost never physically exist other than on a screen. They live on hard drives, they live in your Lightroom catalog, they're on your phones, they get scrolled for two seconds on social media. A print piece is completely different. And just, you know, don't go haywire here. Just print one image. It doesn't have to be huge.
You don't need some museum quality fine art print that sets you back a lot of money for this little experimentation, but print a four by six, a five by seven, an eight by ten, and put it somewhere. Maybe even make a little book from a trip or an outing that you did. I love foxprintdotcom They're like, again, not a sponsor of this episode or anything, but they produce these little Polaroid style shots and they're like 50 cents each.
And sometimes when I feel like it, I'll just print off like 10 or 15 of them from a recent trip or from a very past trip. And I have this, you know, little stack of Polaroid size shots, even with the white border on the bottom. And it's so much fun. So yeah, for 50 cents a piece, you know, it's not gonna set you back a whole lot of money.
The key thing is when photographs become physical objects, they somehow feel more valuable and maybe even more meaningful to you. It it honestly, it reminds you why you took them and do photography in the first place.
You're no longer judging a photograph on a screen with pixels and at 200% magnification, looking for noise and lightening the shadows. You're looking at the whole image. You're remembering the place. You're remembering what happened and really the feeling of being there.
And that's a huge part of photography, but I think unfortunately we are losing it at a little bit more of a a rapid rate these days. So yeah, print photos even if they're small.
Next up, photograph with other people, with friends. An excellent way to re-energize photography is to go out with somebody else, especially somebody who photographs differently than you. There is something absolutely wonderful about standing next to another photographer and watching them point their camera in a completely different direction from you. You're photographing the mountains over here, and they're photographing the peeling paint from a fence. Who knows what it is? And you're thinking, wait, what are you seeing? And then you talk and you look and you might get a little bit inspired in that.
Adds that fun back into the experience. Photography can certainly be solitary and almost meditative. It oftentimes I'd like to say it gets me into a flow state, which I love. I mean, it's a great, great feeling. But other photographers, they tend to expose your blind spots, literally metaphorically. They notice compositions that you may not have noticed. They might even use gear or lenses that you wouldn't normally use for a certain scenario. They get excited about things that you would walk right past. And that enthusiasm, frankly, is contagious.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts of guiding photography trips is seeing somebody get really excited about a photograph. Maybe they've never photographed a bear before, or they've never seen the northern lights, or they finally got a bird in flight in tack sharp focus.
I've done some of these things many, many times. It becomes a little bit routine, but watching somebody else experience these things for the first time really reminds me of how extraordinary and how lucky we are to be able to see these things in the world in the first place. So yeah, join a friend, make a photo buddy, and go out there and shoot alongside them.
I want take a quick break and thank one of the sponsors of the show, ArtHelper. ArtHelper's mission is to create a brighter future for human artists in a world of truly infinite AI content, and it's getting more and more all the time. ArtHelper is no longer just a powerful tool set designed to assist artists in the kind of distribution and promotion of their work. It's long time been that, and it's fantastic tool.
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as well as their really robust and impressive set of tools for photographers while you're there. Okay, back to the show.
so this next one is possibly the most controversial bit of advice in an episode about enjoying photography. leave the camera home sometimes. Don't photograph. Sometimes big big caveat there. Don't do it all the time. We we like photography. So if you're, you know, feeling kind of unenthused or burnt out about your photography, putting pressure on yourself to photograph more may just frankly not be the solution.
Go for a hike without the camera. Travel somewhere and don't photograph every single viewpoint and and every sunset. Watch wildlife through binoculars and don't even raise your camera a single time. It's it's honestly a lot of fun looking through binoculars at wildlife. I mean, says the guide, I know. look at cool light without immediately evaluating it as a photograph.
Because sometimes photography becomes so dominant in our lives that we stop actually experiencing the thing we're trying to photograph.
a little distance from that can really reset. I've definitely had moments where I am somewhere spectacular and realize I'm spending more time thinking about photographing the experience than actually having the experience. So from first hand experience, put the camera down sometimes.
Then when you genuinely wish you had it again, that's probably a good sign that you're ready to get back into it and pick the camera up and go out for a photo walk and try some of these things I'm talking about.
Next up, remember why you started photographing in the first place. And I think ultimately this is probably where it all leads. Why did you start taking pictures?
It probably wasn't because someone told you that you have to do it for Instagram or that your Instagram engagement would dramatically improve. You probably saw something you thought was beautiful or interesting or just maybe even funny or perhaps extraordinary and wanted to capture it and preserve that moment, that memory. Maybe you wanted to remember trips that you take. Maybe you you love wildlife and it gets you closer to the wildlife, literally and metaphorically. Maybe you love just the technology of digital cameras. Maybe you like the challenge or the creative challenge.
Maybe you just enjoyed having a reason to slow down and look at things a little bit longer. whatever that original reason was, try to reconnect with it occasionally because photography has this funny way of becoming more complicated as we get better at it, with better cameras, better lenses, more sophisticated and robust editing and post-processing, but also with that more expectations. these can of course be wonderful, but none of them are actually required.
Required for photography to be enjoyable in the first place. Sometimes the most fun thing you can do is grab one camera, one lens, Walk out the door and photograph whatever catches your attention. You you don't have an agenda, there are no portfolio goals, you have no client that you're trying to deliver for, no social media, no perfect light, just sheer curiosity. And maybe that's kind of the theme of this whole episode: is curiosity. Ask yourself what
If more often. What if I use this lens? What if I photograph from down over there? What if I slow the shutterway down? what if I shoot this or edit this in black and white? What if I come back tomorrow at a different time?
Photography becomes really exciting when you don't completely know what you're gonna get.
And if you've reached a point where you always know exactly what you're gonna get, maybe it's time to frankly deliberately make things a little harder, a little weirder, a little simpler. So the next time photography starts feeling like work or you're just less than enthusiastic about it, don't immediately assume you need new gear or new camera. Although, you know, frankly, new cameras are fun. And I could probably do a whole episode on reinvigorating styles and passions with that too. But you know, for the sake of argument here, try doing less, try using less.
Maybe start with one lens. Give yourself a weird little photo assignment. Photograph something that you don't intend to share. keep on learning. Learn one new technique every time you go out. Print a photograph or print many photographs. Go out with another photographer and try something you're probably gonna be bad at at first. And above all else, stop worrying quite so much about whether every photograph is good or even great. Some of my favorite photography experiences have produced very few photographs that I actually do something with, to be totally honest.
And some of my favorite photographs came from days where I had absolutely no plan to make anything special. But that's really part of the magic here. Photography gives us kind of an excuse to pay more attention to things, to the light, to the animals, the landscapes, the surprising moments, and the fine details of the outdoor world.
And that's a pretty extraordinary hobby, profession, craft, obsession, whatever photography happens to be for you. So keep it fun, keep experimenting, keep that curiosity alive, keep making some bad photographs. And every once in a while, try to photograph with the same excitement you had when you first discovered that turning one little dial would completely change the way the world looked through your camera and lens. So, folks,
thanks so much for tuning in to the Wild Photographer. Keep on photographing out there, keep on exploring, and I'll talk to you next time.
