Hands up if you’ve had that burning desire, sitting in your chair at home (camera in hand) and you’ve asked yourself the questions “What do I post?” Sometimes the routine posting that comes with having social media accounts for your photography is exhausting. And it can burn you out. Without realising we’re constantly thinking about our own photographic ‘output’ in the context of what everyone else is posting and how regularly they are creating content.

I’ve felt like that the past week or so. I’ve kept thinking “I can’t go and post another image from the beach because I posted a beach shot three days ago.” My mind became consumed more with what to post, then what I wanted to shoot.

Usually, when this happens, I know I have to take it back to the basics of what photography is for me; capturing beautiful and simple elements of life in a really intimate way.

So yesterday, I had cracked it. I was sitting at my desk staring blankly into my iMac screen. It’s the artist’s version of standing in front of the fridge door and contemplating life whilst staring into the edible abyss within.

Funny enough no inspiration came sitting robotically at the computer. I grabbed my X-T3, attached the XF35mm F2 and went out into the garden. The gentle breeze coming off the sea made the leaves on the trees dance in the late afternoon’s westerly dying light.

It dawned on me, that even with our photography, sometimes we need to literally ‘come home’ to push the reset button on our creativity. Focusing on a smaller area, essentially on my own patch, actually made me think harder of different angles, different compositions. There was a soft breeze but with the fledgeling ‘Silver Princess’ Gumtree, it’s tender limbs flowed back and forth, no match for the gentle south-westerly. The hyper-boost mode on the new X-T3 made capturing the motion of the dancing leaves rather effortless. Of course, there were still rejects from the shoot, but far less than in the past with previous Fujifilm X-T iterations.

It took no time at all before I was lost in the capture, that exhilaration you get when you are photographing simple beauties in gorgeous light. I focused on the input, the inspiration, the creation, and forgot all about the output, the post, the grid.

All I could think about was how I could truly capture what I was seeing before me; the afternoon light and the choreography of those juvenile leaves in the wind. The light casting shadows of leaves on those of semi-translucence was so beautiful.

It became intoxicating and soon I began looking at the whole garden totally differently. I saw much more ‘light dancing’ going on. In particular a ‘Crimson Sentry’ Maple in the south-west corner of the garden. Their beautiful firey red and maroon leaves just popped against the beautiful pale blue of the sky above.

The videos were an extra element that really helped refresh my process. I thought about taking them into Adobe Premiere Pro CC and tweaking them, but that would have taken away from capturing how gorgeous it was in that moment.

I felt like my creativity had gone through whatever the artistic equivalent is of a carwash! I know there is probably a far more eloquent and poetic metaphor than a carwash, but I think you get what I mean (I sincerely hope you do anyway!).

Let me know, what or where is your ‘reset button’ (or carwash!) for your creativity? I’d love to know what you all do!

If you found this helpful, feel free to share it!