Photography is a more popular hobby than ever before. Between the ubiquity of cameras, the simplicity of digital capture/manipulation/sharing, and the fact that 50% of everyone’s hobbies were off the table during the pandemic, there has been a huge influx of new photographers into the community.
I frequent a lot of forums, subreddits, YouTube channels, etc. where photography is discussed. I see a LOT of questions from new and intermediate photographers who are clearly trying to get better. I’ve answered many hundreds of questions, offered feedback or critique on many hundreds of photos, and had conversations with hundreds of people trying to improve their photography, and the most frequent problem I see is photographers who aren’t working towards a clearly-defined goal with their photography.
So here it is. Probably the most important and fundamental question you can answer for yourself as a photographer, the one that informs everything you do in your photography:
Why am I doing this?
I don’t mean on a photo-by-photo level (although giving some thought to what made you want to take a picture before you click the shutter is also a great idea). I mean as a way to define what’s motivating you to engage in photography. What made you want to get a camera and try this out? What makes you feel like taking your camera with you when you go somewhere, or set aside time on your calendar specifically to photograph?
I can’t tell you how many people I’ve seen who have bought (or are saving up for) expensive camera gear, who have spent countless hours watching YouTube tutorials, who have purchased all their favorite photographers’ Lightroom presets, who have read all the books about technique, and studied the craft and minutiae of how cameras and lenses work, and memorized all the compositional rules that Annie Leibovitz and Leonardo DaVinci use in their work… and they still feel unsatisfied with their art, or directionless in their attempts to get better. Because they don’t know what they’re trying to achieve.
Why am I doing this?
There are endless answers to that question. You almost definitely have more than one. You’ll find new answers as you go along, and discard others. Some answers are awesome. Some are less awesome. Being honest with yourself about what you’re trying to get out of all this is the first, crucial step to improving your photography. No matter where you are in your photography journey, it’s a great idea to sit down with a pen and paper, and spend a little bit of time thinking hard about what makes you want to photograph.
By way of example, let me share some of my reasons along the timeline of when I started photography years ago, when my dad bought me my first camera. It took me a significant amount of time to reflect on what was really driving me during each of these “eras” in my personal photography journey, but I’ve been as truthful about it as possible.
Age 8. I wanted to take pictures because I really enjoyed unloading and loading film in my camera. It was a nifty mechanical process. The faster I could get to the end of the roll, the sooner I could do it again! This explains the pictures I took of a stick in the grass of my childhood front yard, and how I burned through 7 rolls of Kodak Gold 200 in about two hours of walking around at Zion National Park.
Age 12. I wanted to take pictures to be like my Dad. He was always an enthusiastic nature photographer, and had some amazing work printed on our walls. I wanted to do that too. At this age I was shooting a fully automatic 3 megapixel Olympus camera. I spent my birthday money on a SunPak tripod because my dad always shot with a tripod. This explains the pictures I took of landscapes usually pointed in the same direction as my dad’s camera, but lacking the thought that went into his compositions.
Age 17. I wanted to take pictures because I had caught my first glimpse of the satisfaction that comes from making creative decisions about photography. I took a beginner level photography class as an elective during my senior year of High School, and fell in love with the process of deciding on an exposure, taking the shot, and then editing it in Photoshop. This explains the pictures I took of… literally anything. Thousands of them every month.
Age 18. I wanted to take pictures because I could show them off, and other people said nice things about my work. It was an easy way to get praise. My dad had bought me a Canon Rebel XSi as a graduation present. I could go into the mountains, photograph something, and post it to Facebook for my adoring fans. I’m being a little bit cynical here, because I truly did enjoy the photography as more than just a means to an end. But it would be dishonest for me to say that showing off my work wasn’t the primary factor in my motivation to keep shooting. And I want to stress that this isn’t necessarily a bad reason. If you enjoy creating art, and other people like your art, and it feels good to be praised for creating art that someone else liked, then keep doing it! This explains the photos I took of nature and then doctored into incredibly over-saturated (but eye-catching) monstrosities.
Age 21. I wanted to take pictures because I had just rediscovered film. I found the analog process so magical, that I didn’t much care how good or bad the results were. My inner 8-year-old just wanted to pull another roll of film out of the soup and see that it worked! This explains the number of rolls of 35mm film I have filed away from this time in my life, filled with mostly a lot of nothing.
Age 22. I wanted to take pictures because I wanted to create art that I liked. The novelty of tinkering around with Lightroom and chemicals had largely worn off. I found myself coming home after a shoot, looking at the photos, and not being excited about any of them. This is when I first read The Art of Photography by Bruce Barnbaum, and the first time I ever took the time to get introspective about why I was doing photography. The answer I landed on was simple: I saw beauty in nature that I didn’t see anywhere else, and I wanted to take some of that beauty and preserve it in a way that allowed me to see it whenever I wanted. I largely stopped taking unpaid portraits at this point and really focused in on nature photography. This explains the fact that virtually all of my photos (digitally and on film) from this year are on nature paths in the mountains. Although this motivation was simple, it informed my photography in a way that resulted in some rather good photos.
Age 23. I wanted to take pictures because I wanted to find something new and original that hadn’t been done before. At this point, I knew I wanted more than just to capture a scene I thought looked nice. I wanted to dig deeper. I was pretty disillusioned by the sheer volume of nature photos that all looked exactly the same coming from the popular nature photographers on social media. Everyone was shooting the same scenes with the same wide-angle lenses, and processing them with the same saturated, punchy, exposure-blended aesthetic that grabbed the most eyes and generated the most likes in an Instagram feed. I have since dubbed this look the “500px filter.” I wanted to photograph something different so I could stick out from the crowd and interrupt the endless scrolling through the same photos of Iceland, Horseshoe Bend, Multnomah Falls, and Big Sur. I hoped that striving for originality would bring me more attention. I stopped shooting as much digitally, focused on B&W film and silver printing in the darkroom, and got pretty pretentious about how much better wet prints were than inkjet. It was all very reactionary. This explains a lot of the medium format negatives in my archive. Many of them are very abstract. Virtually none of them are of recognizable locations or landmarks. A few of them are good.
Age 24. I wanted to take pictures because I found it to be a peaceful and deeply cathartic method of self-expression. I had grown increasingly frustrated with my inability to come up with work that got me recognition. Nobody could tell how superior my darkroom prints were on Instagram. Nobody was buying my work. And the photographers cranking out 500px-style landscapes still got all the traffic. Being a popular photographer had more to do with marketing skill than photography skill. Nobody seemed to care about originality. And it was probably a fool’s errand anyway - what interesting landscape hasn’t been photographed before? After working through this minor photographic identity crisis, I finally figured out that the photos in my portfolio I liked the most had little overlap with the ones that got the most attention online. I had to choose between taking photos I liked, and catering my content to what was popular online. Stated differently, I figured I had to choose between making art, or spending my increasingly limited free time doing what boiled down to marketing, in order to get more traffic. I chose art. One of my favorite photos I ever took came from this time. It’s not a popular photo as far as print sales, traffic on my Flickr page, or any other metric. But I love it, and see it as a reminder of something very important. It’s exactly the kind of photo that makes me feel satisfied with my work. My library of photos after this shift in my photographic motivations includes digital stuff shot on various cameras, film in a multitude of formats, and a much smaller volume of work in general than many of my previous “eras.” But the percentage of photos that I actually like has gone up significantly.
At the time of publishing this, I’m 29. My photographic motivations are many. I shoot portraits because that’s what people generally pay for in photography. I will say I enjoy the challenge of capturing photos of people that they themselves feel they look good in. As a person who is not necessarily insecure about my appearance, but also aware that I’m objectively not very photogenic, it’s extremely rewarding when a client raves about their wedding photos or headshots or whatever, and I get to see them grow more confident in their appearance. I like shooting portraits, but I don’t have the same passion for portraits as I do for nature.
I shoot nature because when I feel something in the great outdoors, and manage to convey some of that feeling in a photograph, then I get to have that feeling again, at least a little bit, whenever I see it. It’s less about what the place looked like, and more about how it felt. Some of my favorite photographs take me back to what it was like standing there - not just in a visual sense. I feel the biting temperature of a snowy, evergreen-carpeted mountainside, hear the crunching snow under my boots, smell the clean, pine-y air, and in some part, experience the quietude of being in that remote location away from everyday life again.
I shoot nature because, corny as it may seem, sometimes I need to get some emotions out in a way that I haven’t figured out how to do with words. I shoot because I love making photographs, and thankfully I’ve reached a point where my satisfaction with a photo is basically unrelated to how many likes it gets. I still share my work. I enjoy getting positive feedback as much as the next guy. But if I signed a contract tomorrow stating that I could never show anyone my work ever again, I wouldn’t stop shooting; I wouldn’t even slow down. My nature photography is for me. And that’s the best reason I’ve ever personally found to shoot. It no longer matters if someone else thinks the work is bad, or boring, unoriginal, or doesn’t follow the right compositional rules. It doesn’t matter if people misinterpret what I was trying to convey, or glance over a photo without pausing their scroll. It genuinely doesn’t bother me. Only took me 20 years to get here.
You will probably have different reasons for doing photography than I do. I don’t claim my current reasons for staying in this hobby to be any kind of moral high ground, or ultimate “goal” to strive for. If you’re shooting because you want to have the biggest Instagram follower pool on the planet, and you’re finding satisfaction with that, by all means keep doing it! If you hate photography but it’s the best way for you to save up for an Xbox, keep doing it (at least until you get the Xbox). If you don’t have any specific reason for doing photography beyond “taking pictures is fun,” then keep taking pictures until it’s not fun.
No matter how long you’ve been doing photography, especially if you feel like you’re in a rut, I encourage you to spend whatever time you need to figure out why you’re doing this whole photography thing anyway. You might be surprised, but you’ll definitely have a clearer idea of where to go next.