My very sage answer to this is to take a look at what you’ve shot with any camera (even your phone) in the last year. Even if you didn’t do it on purpose or for ‘art,’ what’s captured is probably where your feelings lie.
I’ve spent a lot of time distancing myself from what I shoot. I used to be capturing, processing, and posting daily to I Make Photos Daily, and loved everything I saw. I was too busy capturing and constructing a moment with the camera (before and after processing) to enjoy a moment or to actually interest myself.
The daily photo tumblr grew very popular by my standards (>30,000 followers a year ago), but as soon as I realised that people will care more about oversaturated photos than black and white, or that the level of vignette and bokeh directly correlate into people’s interest, I lost my heart for it and let the Tumblr wither. I now keep more people interested in following it by not publishing to it. I post there very rarely these days, and any time I do I lose about a hundred followers. It’s now down to about 11,000 followers.
The new way I go about it is to shoot and then wait at least a week to even review (let alone process and publish) the work, if I do at all. Sometimes I like knowing I’ve snapped the moment but that I might never go look at it. I’ve also moved pretty hard into Polaroid and instant film as well, so that I can’t tamper with the actual memory, so that I can pre-fill the memory banks with nostalgia for something that wasn’t.
I’d love to feel so much for what I do with the camera again, but right now we have a solid working relationship. It seems pretty happy in my bag daily, and recording the things that I can’t help but want to capture when those things do pop up. Most days it never moves, but it’s always with me, because what good is a photo you wanted to take but couldn’t?
Maybe the goal is to find more things that I can’t imagine not saving in a moment. I’ll be working on that soon enough, I suppose.
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