Katya, early morning
Evan, helping to charge the batteries
While I’m not officially in the off season – I still have two more weddings this year, it’s certainly looms close. I love this time of year. It’s my chance to figure out where things are, where they’re going, and what to improve on for the next season. Some of you might have noticed that I don’t post too many paid shoots other than weddings. While we do engagement sessions all year long along with a handful of corporate work, I really try to treat the down time as a period to explore personal material. It lets me experiment and process what I learn during the season, when things are so hurried and non-stop that there really isn’t much time to think.
One thing that really changed for me last year was my focus on personal work. To some extent, I’ve always documented my own life as well as that around me, but about a year back, the meaning of photography took a 180 degree turn for me. Before that, it was largely driven by the visual nature of the image, and not so much what the picture was about. But I found that I hit a wall. While my technical abilities continued to grow, I didn’t really know what to do with them. Creating more precise exposures in unusual lighting with quicker reaction times and better composition was nice, but it also seemed a little empty.
Something was missing. I found that I wasn’t enjoying taking pictures as much as I used to. In fact, what I really enjoyed the most the previous season was meeting all of the wonderful couples that I did. I cared about the pictures immensely, but more because I wanted to do a good job and I knew how important the day was to each couple. But the actual picture taking began to feel repetitive. Not there’s anything wrong with repetition per se, but there is when it’s not exciting any longer.
So that was my focus last year during the off season. At first, I was focused on trying to find a new look and feel, but I quickly came to realize that wasn’t the problem. What was really the problem was that I was so focused on creating pictures that I thought people would like that I didn’t think about creating pictures that I would like. Even in my personal work, I was looking to create pictures that were impressive, but not necessarily meaningful to me.
So last year was something of a transitional year for me. The pictures I took weren’t so different from the previous year that you’d think it was from a different photographer, but they’re most certainly different to me. They were personal. To me, personal is anything you care about. For which there is authorship. Where the point of the picture is connect you with what the photographer cares about. And by making the pictures personal, I was able to find so much more in both my work for myself and my work weddings. I stopped caring whether the pictures were impressive. I no longer thought about whether they would look good if I submitted them to a magazine or bridal blog. Instead, what I cared about was whether they were meaningful. Did they connect the people to the moment? Did they present an idea or a feeling? Did they have something to say?
I love photography that comes from the heart, where you just know the author is consumed by the pictures he or she takes, because the subject matter and the message matters that much. And I feel like I’m on the right track. So, hopefully, this year in the off-season, I’ll be able to keep pushing. I’m excited, and I’m looking forward to sharing a little more of my personal life, more of my discoveries, and more of my thoughts on why photography matters so much to me.
