“Who is My Photography Really For?”

It’s a question that I’ve been wrestling with the past couple of months. Who am I creating for? What am I creating for?

These questions kept popping up in my head, but I kept putting them to the side.

On Monday night, I had had enough. It was just after 7:30 in the evening and I grabbed my gear, keys and jumped into the car and headed to the beach.

I tried getting images that I had seen on social media, grasses in focus with a frothy sea at sunset in the background.

 

      

 

I just wasn’t feeling it, I felt removed from what was really going on down on the sands, so I ditched the grasses and headed down on to the beach.
The light was magical, the western edge of the beach was awash in that summery, hazy light that bathes all compositions in the warmest of orange and yellow tones.
People coming and going from the water’s edge, people of all ages; identities cloaked in the privacy of their sunset silhouettes.

 

   

I sat on the beach and just watched; only raising my camera to my eye when something caught it. I wasn’t thinking about who I was shooting for, because I was just capturing. I was observing, watching, soaking in the sun. I sat there looking at the children running into the water wondering if they,at that moment, were making memories that would last their lifetime.

Then I saw this man.

 

 

He seemed so incredibly present in this moment, yet a million miles away. I wondered if standing there in the shallows of the breaking waters meant anything to him.
Whether the tide coming in and out provided a cleanse for the mind, or were the waters for him nothing more than a refreshing coolness for a hot and tired body.

I wasn’t searching for compositions anymore, I was feeling grateful for capturing moments. It was amazing what happened when I stopped searching because I started to see.

 

   

   

 

I started to see the importance of the beach to both man and animal. How gazing into the blue abyss that is the ocean could be a soothing experience for both beachgoers and
birds alike. The sea provided a playground of activity for the humans and the brisk southerly coming off Bass Strait currents held the gulls high above, gently guiding them north, to and fro by the breeze.

Before long, I just kept snapping. It didn’t matter whether I was adhering to the aesthetic of my social media accounts, I was capturing my experience of the beach. This is what I saw. It had nothing to do with what anyone else would want to see of the beach, whether people like it, how many likes would it get.

 

   

 

After the shoot, I went home and watched Thomas Heaton’s latest videos; one of them was about starting over and it addressed and more eloquently put into words (and video!) how I had been feeling about photography. Thomas is right. It’s not about what camera I use, that’s not what moves human beings about an image. It’s about making the most of the conditions you have, and not writing them off. Without realising it, I too had been more worried about the right weather, the right light, the right conditions. Lately, the weather had been too hot, the sun too bright, I was too tired. I think I was creatively exhausted as well.

So what was it about Monday night that made me go? Well, it was that I just had to break the rut. Without realising it, my creativity yearned for just a photoshoot where I completely freed myself of the pressures of the last nine squares on my Instagram account. I gave myself the freedom to just experiment.
I was creating. Capturing compositions that were purely for me, and no one else.