My thought on how to stay inspired in your photography:
Tighten your feedback loop between shooting, selecting your photos, and publishing your photos.
This will keep you prolific to keep shooting new photos, derive new delights from your new photos, and also be able to share your new photos (preferably on your own blog).
Simple ideas:
Shoot only jpeg with an in-camera filter you like.
Import and select your photos quickly and effectively. Experiment using iPad to import photos from SD card reader (lightning to SD), favorite your favorites and then upload them straight to your WordPress blog.
Just use the jpeg files. Don’t worry about post processing. This will save you much time and effort, and free up mental energy to go out and shoot more new photos!
The best feedback you can get is from yourself: whether your photos bring you joy or not. Otherwise upload your photos to arsbeta.com for real feedback and critique.
Why tighten your feedback loop in photography?
The upside of digital photography: instant feedback, which allows us to learn and improve at a much more rapid pace. Why not use this to our advantage?
Many of us desire more money, however I believe a better goal is this:
Seek to maximize your leisure hours and mental space.
Better to be poorer with more leisure than richer with less leisure.
Leisure as hours and emptiness of mind
Leisure requires an emptying of your mind. Fewer cares, duties, obligations, and responsibilities. Even if you had 10 hours of free time, as long as you got all these worries and concerns in your mind, you cannot leverage your time for creative, philosophical, or scholarly ends.
Or in short:
Seek more freedom and leisure to indulge your creative activities. Less concern with money, fame, and honors.
For example in photography, be highly selective about the photos you decide to keep or ditch.
In life, be highly selective in terms of the people you decide to let into your life. Be highly selective of the foods you eat, be highly selective of the books you read, and be very selective about the music and media you consume.
Life is limited and short. We cannot do everything, we cannot read everything, and we cannot listen to everything.
Perhaps this is the secret to thriving in life: deciding what NOT do do, what NOT to listen to, and what to ignore.
Hero: a demi-god, a watcher or protector of others. In Ancient Greek a hero was any of the major combatants in the Iliad (either the Greek or the Trojan side).
I think today, we need heroes, role models, and people we want to emulate more than ever.
Considering how short our lives are, it seems to be a waste of time, life, and energy to focus too much on small and petty lifestyle choices.
Better to focus on your big, massive, and audacious goal in life, and ignore the small and petty.
This means, don’t worry too much about the coffee you drink (or how to extract it), cars, clothes, devices, cameras, foods, modes of living (minimalist) or your aesthetics. Just do what works for you, keep it simple and straightforward, and devote your precious energies on artistic and philosophical creation!
The less energy we waste on petty decisions, the more energy we have to dictate and direct the great decisions in our life!
Where does our initial impetus to create art come from?
For example a lot of older Freudian philosophers assume that the urge to create art is sexual; creating art as procreation (of your own children). This might be plausible, but there must be more to it.
I cannot speak for others, but let me try to best describe where I think I get my personal impetus to create art from:
Similar to Elon Musk — unified field theory of his companies (Space X, Tesla, Solar City) all working together and feeding into one another (Ashlee Vance idea from his biography on Musk).
Basic idea for us as photographers — let us create our own unified field theory to connect all the aspects of photography:
My life purpose: to blog, to share ideas, to think, to plumb deeper levels of knowledge, aesthetics, and art, and to help motivate creators, photographers, and all individuals — to make, wonder, and challenge.
I had a nice chat with my buddy Don Dillonthe other day, and this was one of the big takeaways:
Once you’re a good photographer with a substantial body of work, NOW WHAT?
Meaning — what are your next steps in your photography? Some simple ideas:
Use Adobe Sparkto make a dynamic website/portfolio of your best work. Then share the link with friends and family and ask them: “How do the photos make you feel?” Then add testimonials to the page.
Publish your photographs as an “e-magazine” (digital magazine) by using iBooks Author (video tutorial)
Use Adobe InDesign to create a print book layout, and send the PDF file to a local printer, to make a ‘zine’ (magazine) of your work. Start by printing 20 copies, and distributing them to friends and family for free. Based on their feedback, try to sell them to your followers for $19.95 each afterwards.
Start blogging about your photographic experiences and life experiences. To keep it simple, signup on wordpress.comand start blogging! The secret: your blog posts don’t need to be “good”. Just make them honest, fun, and share your works in progress.
Continue to build your following: Start an email newsletter via Mailchimp.com(what I use here) and keep your followers updated with your progress.
The rolling stone never gathers moss: Keep on rolling. The purpose is for you to keep making photography FUN! (Don’s idea). As long as you’re having fun in photography, you’re doing all the right things!
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Composition as an impression. Fleeting, moving, dynamic, full of life and vigor.
To better understand your compositions and photographic and visual gist, sketch your images. I use procreate to trace my favorite compositions to better understand them, and to also deconstruct them for future reference — to create even more dynamic images in the future.Â
Money is a mode of human and social interaction, of quantifying labor, and a medium of human trust. Money isn’t “realâ€â€” it isn’t a physical thing, it is a metaphysical notion of “value†and “worthâ€.
Thus a life chasing money is the wrong life. The better life — chase artistic creation, human interactions, and pushing sociology, culture, and human thriving forward.
Don’t use money to quantify yourself or your progress in life. When Achilles died we had no idea what his net wealth was. I have no idea how rich Steve Jobs was when he died (or when he was alive). Even Elon Musk’s net worth isn’t interesting to me; what’s more interesting is what he is working on, what his ideas are and what he’s building.
Ultimately the point I want to make is this:
Money isn’t the ultimate goal in life. The goal is personal and artistic greatness and creating a legacy which will empower future humans!
It seems the purpose of utilitarianism and most of modern economics and philosophy is this:
Raise the collective well-being of all humans.
I think this is a good goal, but what does this even mean?
What is “well-being� Is it tied to physiological health and wellness, or is it tied to material wealth, and having lots of possessions?
Let me make the claim that the problem of modern capitalist philosophy and utilitarian thinking is that “quality of life†is tied to material and consumer goods, not physical and physiological/mental wellness, thriving, and health.
I like this notion of a ‘high culture’ (“haute culture” in French).
What if we could do the same in the realm of photography? To elevate the culture of photography to a higher height. To go BEYOND small and petty issues in photography. To think long-term in our photography and artwork, to focus on long-term thriving, and to use this knowledge to EMPOWER ALL PHOTOGRAPHERS on the globe, and far into the future!
The point isn’t to eliminate all forms of pain and suffering.
The point is:
Gain more freedom over your personal life, and channel the GOOD types of pain and “suffering” to propel you to higher heights, and to become more epic and powerful!
