If you create even when you don’t feel like it, you get better. Regular readers might object. Didn’t I just say that photography of all types requires, “studied sensitivity and technical mastery.” Can it be both? Yes.
Here are seven reasons that creating even when you don’t feel like it is the answer — that it leads to studied sensitivity and technical mastery. In fact, it is the means of developing those attributes.
1. Create anyway to improve your awareness of reality
Waiting for inspiration is a kind of counterfeit sensitivity.
I think waiting for the stars to align is usually a copout. Okay, if we’re talking night sky photography, it might be literally necessary, but theres an app or two for planning those nights. And you should definitely pick up the camera in the meantime.
When you begin to create regularly, you learn to work with what you have. The prerequisite to working with what you have is seeing what there is to work with. Really seeing.
It is so easy (at least for me) to walk around at least 50% absent. It is off worrying or planning, ruminating or reminiscing like a dog on a leash running every which way. Unlike a dog because I am missing what is in front of my nose by doing that.
The past and the future are made up of moments too. These single bites of time are the only way I can process what is really there.
Photography deepens factual perception
When I head out with my camera, I am teaching myself to focus on what is real. The moment and the image are subjective creations, but they are made out of elemental reality.
Reality is fractally complex. Gestalts are highly compressed. I cannot see tulips on my dining room table in a glance — not without heavy losses to that compression.
Reality is impossibly dense. There is too much information to gulp it all at once. My dining room flowers are too packed with physical, chemical, biological, aesthetic, psychological, economic, social and spiritual realities. From subatomic particles to supply chains, they offer too many thoughts to think all at once.
I must surf reality serially. I need to meander through it as an experience. I must live through that experience like a tiny window. Moment by moment. One bite of time… at a time.
Photography manifests this truth. It instantiates framing. And the more I do it, the better, my reality. The more I learn angles, approaches, and perspectives. The greater my perceptual repertoire.
Photography deepens factual perception, that is a species of genuine sensitivity.
2. Create even when you don’t feel like it, and you will feel like it.
The density of reality makes perception glorious fun. If you don’t worry too much about feeling like it and create anyway, pretty soon you will feel like it.
This usually applies in a given instance, and it definitely applies across a series of creative sessions. Picking up the camera leads to wanting to pick up the camera.
Some days, merely picking up the camera is a victory, and the rewards of that victory might not be apparent for a week, but better rewards a week from now than no rewards at all.
3. Create anyway to keep your creative juices flowing
When you are waiting for the right moment, you are succumbing to perfectionism. Perfectionism is imperfection. Practice makes perfect not refusing to take pictures until you know they will turn out. That can become a way of life. And for me, it did.
It’s paralyzing, it feels terrible, and there is no reason to endure it.
Opportunity costs likely don’t matter
Not for most photographers. If you’re reading this as a non-photographer, stick with me for a moment. This argument may apply.
See, there hasn’t been a reason for most photographers to avoid shooting for at about 20 years. Before that, you had to think some about the opportunity costs of exposing 1/36th of your roll of slide film. Maybe 1/108th of your total. Plus processing costs.
Unless you’re using film, those reasons don’t apply. Even if you are, a majority of every roll is going to go into the garbage can.
If you’re working digitally, your equipment is sitting there going obsolete whether you trip the shutter or not. Go take make great images!
If you’re a non-photographer who hung with me, the same general argument may apply. For example a digital illustrator doesn’t use up any paint. A musician or writer has hardware sitting around.
And even if you do have to use up supplies to produce, you cannot get more efficient at using materials by refusing to practice. So even if you are using expensive large format film, or oil paints or whatever, it’s still better to create than to avoid creating.
4. Create anyway to increase your technical mastery
Create even when you don’t feel like it to practice. And you know what they say, “practice, practice, practice.” I don’t know exactly who they are, but they all say it. And you know it. Right?
You can either be a better or a worse artist when inspiration does strike. Inspiration comes as ideas, not as technical competence. At least that’s how it works for me!
You need to try to make something with what you have so that you can be better at making something with what you don’t yet have when it comes along.
The more you make something the more you
- improve, in part because you,
- find out what you need to improve at now,
- review the stuff you already know you need to get better at, and
- cement the things you have learned.
You can advance toward the next level creatively
When you push yourself technically, you become better at pushing yourself creatively. You get out of your own way. The same reasoning applies. You need to exhaust your current abilities and push yourself before you level up creatively.
When you create even if you don’t feel like it, you get better at getting out of your own way.
You can’t do that while waiting to fee like it. In fact, you will probably feel like avoiding it at the worst possible time.
At least for me, I get frustrated and restless when I start to sense that I could do better. I feel something lacking. And I often have only found the solution by taking the camera out and making more images.
Though sometimes it comes after running into a block and then taking a break.
Either way, I cannot get through the next challenge without working.
5. Create anyway to get better at noticing
When you continually take pictures, your mind starts to notice them in unexpected places. This is a corollary of #1. For me, this is one of the reasons to make fine art images.
It’s one of the biggest reasons I do what I do. Maybe the most important.
I want to spread images that make people meditate on the good. The. Good. But I cannot do that if I create only when I feel inspired.
6. Create anyway to be inspired
In fact, I would argue that inspiration works the other way around. It is not something that usually seizes a person out of nowhere. It is like popping a balloon or breaking a record. You have to push and push with minimal change, and then, bang! It happens, “all at once.”
7. Create anyway to practice meditating
For me, photography is a formalized exercise in that meditation. When I don’t do it, I can feel that something is wrong. I need to constantly go out and get good things on which to dwell.
This is one reason I don’t shoot film. When I do, I feel like I’ve gotten 75% of the benefits before I even send it in for processing. I often forget. But with digital, I can share my path. I can share my day’s meditation with you.
8. Professionals create even when they don’t feel like it
A professional can make images even if conditions aren’t perfect. A professional, by definition, gets results — almost no matter what.
The more photographs you make, the better you get at making photographs. It’s like cardiovascular exercise for your creative mind. when you do more conditioning, your heart forms new blood vessels, and it’s harder to block off blood flow.
When you keep creating, you find many pathways to excellence, and it is harder for you to have a creative infarction.
Thank you
If you’ve made it this far, nice! I’m not going to ask you to buy me coffee, but you can tell me which tulip image you liked best (1, 2, 3 or 4), or follow me on social media.
I’m on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you liked the images in this post, I’m trying to figure out some more useful ways to share them. Comment or reach out on social media and let me know.
Go and create something — even if you don’t feel like it.