My one year break from photography...

You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been pretty quiet here. Well, I took a break from photography for a while. A year to be precise. Well, precise enough. Now I’m making a return. Well, sort of.

Why the step back? The quick answer is that I lost my love and passion for photography and ended up burning out for a number of personal reasons. The pursuit of my photography career was having significant impacts on my mental health and I needed to step back and take a break.

My photography wasn’t making me any significant financial return. It wasn’t being widely received or recognised. I’ve never won any awards or any significant acclaim. No massive social media following. I was financially poor and therefore I had to get another full-time job which meant less time for actual photography. Covid-19 happened. The passion was fading away more and more over time until I ended up in a place where I wasn’t even picking up my camera. It was just sitting there in my bag, day after day, week after week, until months passed by without a single shutter count being recorded. Could I even call myself a professional photographer anymore? Then more recently, I have been feeling the urge to pick up my camera again and take some photographs of the things that I enjoy, no pressure attached, not for monetary reasons or self promotion, just to see what I get. Scratch that creative itch I could feel resurfacing. It may be something to do with moving my life to North Wales.

During my time away from photography, I was asking myself many questions about the last few years working as a professional photographer. The more I thought about it, the deeper the internal dialogue I had with myself and the more I kept asking myself if any of the stuff mentioned in my opening few sentences even mattered? Ultimately, this break away from photography was to ask myself a few simple questions - ‘Why do I enjoy photography?’. ‘Why did I want to be a professional photographer in the first place?’. Trying to answer these questions was key for me.

We seem to be living more and more in a world that is dominated by the need for recognition, for fame or public success, or only to do things for monetary return. We seem to have a desire to live our lives through posting on social media, only showing off the very best of our lives, this perfect image, in the arbitrary hope of seeing our digital ‘likes’ and following increase and increase, proving to ourselves that we are ‘better‘ or more successful than others, than our ‘competition’. It seems we may have arrived at a point where we only really do things largely for these reasons and for me that included photography and that was having an effect on me. The quest for a fantastic image I could show off on Instagram. An image that will get the most likes on social media in order to try and grow my following and my reach. This seemed to be entirely what was driving my photography.

It was back in 2021 that I made the decision to permanently remove myself from the increasingly volatile and toxic world of social media. I only kept my FaceBook account active for communicating with friends and contacts through the messenger app. Why was I allowing the social media companies algorithms to have so much influence, control and effect over my thinking, my passion of photography and my career on a daily basis? Success and exposure judged on ‘digital likes’. People being deemed successful, worthwhile or a great photographer based on how many Instagram followers they had or how many likes certain photographs were getting. It seems that almost overnight we have created this world where there is a desperate need and desire for online approval. Don’t even get me started on what now appears to have been the sudden eruption of people marketing themselves as so called ‘influencers’. This signalled the end for me. The world of social media is, in my opinion becoming more and more out of control and frankly doing more harm than good for society. It is on a very dangerous trajectory. We are letting social media dictate and control what we see, our opinions, our views on a constant daily basis. I have been hearing more and more lately about how Instagram in particular is changing algorithms to influence what we do and don’t see. We only see what it wants us to see. How is that healthy for photography? For the Arts? Or even just life in general?.

When I was using social media, I felt a need, an obligation to post images to my photography account constantly. Afterall, that’s what it tells you that you HAVE to do. Post post POST! Everyday! Photography was becoming something I felt I had to do, not something I wanted to do. Every hike, holiday, day trip had to result in coming back with images I could post on social media. The enjoyment of photography and the whole photography process had simply disappeared for me. I wasn’t taking photos for the enjoyment it gave me or for the challenge of the creative process, I was taking them because social media was telling me I needed to if I wanted to be successful and gain a bigger reach and following, which in turn more recognition for my work and then career progression, so I believed. I decided I no longer wanted the pressure of having to be constantly thinking about what might work well for social media, what images I thought other people might like in order to boost my online following and obtain likes and online interaction, or what images tied into my ‘style’ or my ‘social media image’. I wanted to do photography for myself not for the Instagram overlords. I wanted to take photos of subjects I enjoyed, whether that be landscapes, street photography, portraits or travel images. Why was I so desperate to create a photo deemed good enough to post online? Why did I need to worry myself over whether other people would like my photography or not? So, I decided that I would just do photography for my own enjoyment.

I have been asking myself questions such as: ‘I wonder how many incredible photographs have never been seen other than by the photographer themselves, because they have never been posted online?’ Or ‘I wonder if the World’s greatest photographer has never really been discovered because they don’t use social media?’ That doesn’t mean I am dead set against sharing your work on social media, definitely not. I just don’t believe it is the place to grow a photography business. What it means is I have been trying to get back to a place whereby I was doing photography for more simplistic and raw reasons – for myself and my own enjoyment first and foremost. There might be people who say you could just post your images online and not care over the number of likes and comments you get, but deep down we all know that we would care and be constantly checking, and furthermore we would still be going out more often than not with the notion in the back of our minds, with the ambition and aim to photograph something we think might be social media worthy or that other people might like.

Now, I no longer work full time as a photographer and so I am not reliant on the income (or what was a lack of!), I am not stressing over where the next pay cheque might come from, and therefore I am free to just enjoy the creative process of photography and creating imagery that I enjoy and can be proud of. I’m not reliant on others telling me whether I am good enough or not, because it doesn’t matter. Photography, along with all the arts is a purely subjective form and therefore my photography is simply my photography. It is for me. There is no right or wrong. There is no judgement. There is no competition. There is just me and my camera heading out on adventures into the hills and mountains, travelling around here and there, and if I see a composition I want to photograph, I will. If not, then it really doesn’t matter. I will use my website to showcase my favourite work. To connect with others. To connect with the photography community. I will go back to accepting some paid photography work again but without the constant pressure. I definitely won’t be heading back to the world of social media however. My photography will be condensed to this website and if you would like to stay up to date with myself and my photography, this is where you can do so.

For now, though, I do have an exciting development...I have decided to make a reinvestment into some new gear and it is a significant change after many years. I’ll be writing a blog post explaining all about this in due course, so be sure to check back in a couple of weeks to find out more.

Disclaimer: Since writing this post, I have decided to give LinkedIn a try, as I believe at present it is much more focused on professional networking.