Hello everyone this months journal of my time in Newfoundland is more of a collection of my thoughts over the past month about posting on social media and how often to take photographs than a list of notable events, it’s still extremely cold here in Newfoundland so taking trips out of town is a challenge, but my father did come down for a visit this month and we ended up going to Marble mountain, he went skiing and I went snowboarding. The entire time was a ton of fun, Marble is by far the best hill I’ve ever been on for snowboarding.
I’ve started to stray away from taking photographs every single day, and started taking them more every other day, simply because work and life just get in the way, I was starting to beat myself up over this the other day, thinking that I may not be as I was, and how as a street photographer you need to practice all the time in order to get better at your craft but through this train of thought I realized that it’s hard to get all of the things done that you want to do. I remember I used to be able to go weeks without taking photographs and it didn’t really bother me too much, and now I miss a single day and I start to beat myself up over it, and that’s when I realized that I’m exactly where I need to be in my photography, having self-imposed standards when it comes to creating every day and when I don’t meet those standards I realize it’s a problem. This is precisely what’s necessary in order to become a better photographer. Recognizing the problem and seeing where to make changes is 90% of the battle. nobody has ever lived a perfect life where they accomplished everything that they wanted to do, and that’s okay as long as you have an idea of what it is that you want to do, and you’re conscience is telling you when you’re starting to slack on those goals then at least you have the self awareness necessary to start making changes in your life to better your productivity.
Speaking of goals I’ve been thinking recently about my previous self and how I would always shrug off big goals like careers, how when it came to acting in a way that was beneficial to myself and making a structured plan towards achieving what it is I want to achieve. In the last few months I think I’ve made some strides towards getting better at making plans that are beneficial to my photography goals. For example things like getting more people to see my work, this way I might be able to inspire other people to appreciate the little parts of life that are so often unrecognized, through my photography I want others to see beauty in the mundane parts of life. I’ve started this blog in order to spread my ideas on photography and I’ve received some feedback from friends telling me they really like what it is that I do, this is probably the one of the greatest feelings ever, thank you all for all of the kind words about what I do, it means the world to me and helps me be inspired to make more blog posts. and I’ve started posting my photos on instagram, I don’t know why I never used instagram in the past because I didn’t see the point in being just another user in a seemingly endless ocean of people posting there work. But then I remembered a quote often attributed to Ghandi “Be the change you want to see” and I thought about what it is that I see on instagram that I like and don’t like. I like seeing good work, and I hate seeing a large quantity of “meh” photos that don’t really contribute much value. My response? only post the best photos I have onto the platform. One of the things about instagram is that there’s so much amazing work, but it’s a system designed to get people to scroll through the highest amount of photographs in the shortest amount of time. It’s hard to slow down and really appreciate the amazing work that all of these great photographers are doing. If you see fifty amazing photographs in the span of two minutes you may enjoy each and every photograph, but at the end of the day how many of those amazing photographs are you going to remember? my response? to add a bit of extra value to my instagram posts by including a quote from an artist, author, or inspirational figure that meshes well with the photograph, this way there’s an extra bit of value to the posts and the people that take the time out to read the description will hopefully take a second look at the photograph and really take the time out to observe the subtleties instead of just glancing at it for a few seconds. And if they like the quote they might start to wonder who the person is and may hopefully find some extra inspiration for their lives, because all of the people that I quote are people that have influenced my thought process for the better, and through their actions have inspired me to realize the power that creating has.
