I Found my Photo Mojo
It probably won’t be a surprise when I say I’ve been struggling with my photography the last few months. I’ve been taking some decent images, but nothing I considered special. I’ve enjoyed working with the feeder and the birds, but it’s all been rather — documentary. And for the most part, I just haven’t been feeling the motivation.
There is a location that is literally about five minute from my house that I’ve birded a few times, but as I’ve visited it, I started noticing that I was often seeing a few photographers out their with their big birding lenses. I ended up wandering over and talking to a couple, and they filled me in on why they were visiting the location.
Big Beef Creek is a couple of minutes outside of Seabeck on Seabeck Highway, and it is nothing more than pull-outs on both sides of a two lane road. It overlooks the hood canal as it heads south. The area next to Big Beef is very shallow and it turns out that at low tide, it is a reliable smorgasborg for many of the local species, especially Great Blue Herons and our friend, the Bald Eagle. There are a number of photographers who are out there regularly around low tide because the birds come in reliably to feed. (It turns out I’d already heard of the place but not connected it to that location, in my head, because it’s kind of famous locally).
So on July 1 I had some free time, and I grabbed my birding rig and headed out, sat myself down in the camp chair, and decided to see what happened.
What happened was that when I arrived, I counted 19 bald eagles of various ages within easy view, along with a dozen or more herons, a few flocks of Canada Geese, and hanging out near one of the houses adjoining the location that has put up purple martin boxes, I found — purple martins. Also, of course, the local gull, the Glaucous-Winged Gull.
Over a period of about an hour and a half I shot over 800 frames and I realized I was starting to feel that tingle of joy I have gotten when I’ve been on the chase for good images and felt like I was actually finding them. In reviewing and processing the images, I ended up keeping about 20, and I think a few of them are pretty nice. Also: Bald Eagles! Many Bald Eagles!
So I find my brain has shifted from “do I bother carrying the camera? eh….” to “yeah, let’s do this!”, and I’m finding my motivation and enthusiasm again.
In working the images later, I had some ome retrospective thinking about this, and maybe it’ll offer some perspective to all of you about your own motivations and enthusiasms about photography, especially when it’s waning a bit. As a bird photographer in Silicon Valley, I knew the area incredibly well, and I could almost always aim myself at a location where I could find the birds and come home with something decent. Here in Washington, I don’t know the area well at all, and so I’m often guessing at what might be where, and often wrong. So it’s been kind of a reality for me where I wasn’t going out to see if I could get good images, but get any at all.
I’m also not a person who can walk into a new/strange location and size it up and immediately start shooting productively. It can take me a few visits before I start really seeing the opportunities, both with bird photography and in my landscape work. I have to get a little familiar with a place to start seeing compositions, in part, I think, because my brain needs to organize my thoughts about a location before it can start finding interesting within the location. There are exceptions, of course, but I rarely come back with anything I like, much less love, on my first visit somewhere.
If you understand that about yourself, you can adjust your plans and expectations accordingly. One of the things I’ve been doing as I’ve been trying to explore this area and visit is to make my first visit with a minimum of gear — me, my binoculars and my phone — so I don’t complicate things by trying to both be the explorer and catalogger of the place and the photographer and the birder and the blogger.
One of the things I’ve started doing on these walks to help me start building up ideas for the landscape side of my photography is to take scouting shots of things that catch my attention:
These are not by any sense of the imagination great shots, or even good compositions, but me trying to catalog what I’m finding interesting as a way to help me find the things to focus on and look for when I do go out to shoot. I don’t process them or try to make them look pretty, but they’re giving me a sense of where I’m finding interesting things to pursue. These four are all from Hawley Cove Park in Bainbridge Island, for instance, and show one common thing that I keep finding myself studying: nurse trees.
It’s been a complicated while for my and my photography, my move to Washington gave me new places to learn and explore, but I don’t find photography productive when I’m in that learning phase. I’ve also had limited time to explore, and my vertigo has at times prevented it completely. The key for me to to recognize that when I’m in these quiet times I need to be patient and not get frustrated or push too hard. Instead, soemtimes it makes sense to just put the camera in a drawer and give it a rest, and sometimes poking around the edges by, oh, taking scouting photos and just puttering my way through with no expectations.
I feel like I’m hitting an inflection point in a good way. I finally got the thrill back in the bird photography, and I’m starting to see how I can move that forward in good ways — in fact, I came back from that shoot feeling good enough about where this is going I did something significant for my photography I’ll talk about in the next blog post.
And on the landscape side, some things are starting to fall into place. I know my images are going to be massively different than I used to try to shoot, and while I haven’t really nailed down a plan or a project to start creating images, I know what direction I want to head towards to get there. Your photography is going to grow and changes over time, and that’s a good thing. That process of change can be stressful and painful, but fighting it will generally make it worse, not better.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that my photography suffers when I’m under stress (self-induced or not); in reality the last 18 months of preparing for and moving to Washington, and then settling in here, along with some of the fun and games I’ve played with my vertigo, have been rather stressful. And now mostly behind me, and I’m seeing that in a shift in attitude about the camera.
I still have a lot of work to learn this area to figure out where to go for the bird photography, but I’m looking forward to doing and maybe talking about those explorations. And I’m starting to feel like I have some ideas of how I want to show off this new place I’ve chosen to live, although that idea is still very vague and fuzzy and I need to keep working on it. Other than I know I need to start finding good places to photograph the ferries around here and having some fun with some of the more interesting-looking towns in the area.
I feel like I finally have traction, and that’s what I’ve been waiting for…
