While I’m not going to argue that a camera and lens are important parts of taking a photo, your mindset plays a huge role in your chances of success. I always like to say that a lot of photography is ‘right place, right time, right gear, right mindset’. While we might have limited control of the first two, and we may face gear limitations due to budget, the one thing we always have control over is our mindset. In the past, due to being too rigid, I’ve returned from countless outings empty handed because things didn’t go exactly as I’d planned. As I’ve continued to grow as a photographer, and as my time with my camera has become more limited, I’ve had to make a few changes. Not to gear, nor to my software, but to the way I think while heading out or in the field. While some of these might seem like common sense, I thought it might be worth sharing some of these changes to my habits, in the hopes that it might help someone out there who’s struggling to get a keeper or to even find the motivation to take their camera out of their bag.
1) Work With the Conditions You Have - I can literally hear your eyes rolling at the idea of this being some kind of breakthrough, but hear me out. I can’t count the number of times that, in my earlier years, I’d arrived at a specific location to shoot a specific scene, only to leave empty handed, because the sunset wasn’t quite nice enough. In many of these cases, my camera wouldn’t even leave the bag. I think my original fascination with perfect conditions came from spending too much time on the photography side of the internet. Being primarily exposed to epic landscapes with epic conditions led me to believe I had to be striving to produce the same level of image every single time. However, in recent years, I’ve become a little more flexible when it comes to what I’ll shoot, which means even if conditions aren’t perfect I’ll try to find a way to make the scene work with the conditions I have, rather than the ones I wish I had. Sometimes, I’m able to shoot the subject or landscape I was planning to, but sometimes it means I have to look around and find something else to point my camera at. It doesn’t always generate a mind-blowing image, but 60% of the time, it works every time, which is better than not even trying.
2) Embrace People - We’ve all been there, you’re on your way to a location with the perfect image in mind only to get there to find the worst mammal of all deciding to simply exist in the very location you planned to shoot. How dare they. In the past, that would have been curtains for my shoot as I used to consider a shot ‘unusable’ if even a single person was in my frame. However, living in Japan, finding a location without at least a few people in the frame can be quite challenging. As such, in recent years, I’ve embraced including people in my frame. Despite how I used to think, people can actually enhance an image by adding life to the scene or by being used to show the scale of the elements within your image. These days, I more often than not find myself actually hoping to have a few people at the locations I plan to shoot. Of course, this depends on the situation, but next time you’re out and someone gets in your frame, rather than thinking they’ve ruined your perfect shot, try to find a way to have them enhance it. You might be surprised with the results.
3) Stop Worrying About Looking Weird - Speaking of people, their impact on us in the field goes beyond them ending up in front of our camera. They can also change how comfortable we feel behind the camera. I’ve been in more than a few situation where I wanted to get a shot, but I hesitated, because I was worried about looking weird. However, whether it’s contorting yourself into a position that can only be described as ‘crazy person yoga’ or using your body as a shield from the wind, sometimes you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do. This has most often been an issue for me when shooting abstract architecture in cities. In Japan and Korea, people usually just stopped to look at what I could possibly be taking a picture of, but back home I’ve had people shout at me from their cars. However, these days, I try my best not to care how I look, so long as I get the shot and I’m not impeding anyone. People might have questions or thoughts about my weirdness, but I have responses. What am I pointing my lens at? A perfect subject. Why does it look like I’m hugging my camera on the beach? I’m a romantic. Is my butt hanging out? You’re welcome. At the end of the day, most people aren’t going to think about you for longer than a few minutes, so go ahead and look weird to get that shot.
4) Just Do It - On the topic of hesitation, I think most photographers can relate to lacking motivation from time to time. Sometimes, I stand over my camera bag and think to myself ‘is this going to be worth the effort?’ It’s a question I still find myself asking on occasion, and the answer is almost always ‘probably’. I’ve found when I’m lacking motivation that leaving the house is the often hardest part of a photography outing. In the past, the effort of packing everything into my bag, and the thought of lugging that bag around was sometimes enough to make me cancel an outing altogether. However, that feeling usually starts to subside once I actually step out the door. It doesn’t always happen right away, but when I’m out in the field, I tend to feel my creative juices get flowing and I find my hesitation replaced by motivation. It doesn’t always result in a keeper, but sometimes photography is more about the experience. At the end of the day, an outing where you come home without any photos was still a day spent out of the house which, unless you have a particularly nice house, isn’t usually a bad thing.
5) Take One More Look - Ideally, when photographing a location, we arrive having done some digital scouting to get a rough idea of what our composition is going to be. Then, when we finally get there in person, we find the composition we scouted, get our gear out, choose the proper settings, and snap away. Content with the image we’ve captured, we pack up and move on. However, in the past I’ve sometimes been too quick to leave, causing me to miss out on what might have been a better composition I hadn’t noticed while scouting. These days, I make a conscious effort to take one more look around before packing up, especially if I’m doing photography on a trip. On more than a few occasions, I’ve come across a new composition that I like more than the one I thought was perfect. This also goes for the images you’ve taken. Before packing up take a long hard look at them to make sure there aren’t any distractions your eyes missed the first time around and make sure everything is in focus. There aren’t many things worse than leaving a location proud of the shot you took, only to load it into your editing software and discover there’s an issue with it that even Photoshop can fix. There isn’t enough Rocky Road ice cream in the world to quell that feeling of regret, so just take one more look. You’ll come home with better images more often, and you’ll save a fortune on ice cream
6) It’s Worth Going Back, Even When it Isn’t - This one is a bit similar to my previous point, but has to do more with that feeling you might get in your gut telling you that you are leaving too soon. This applies most to when you’re shooting at sunset or sunrise, as the light can change the scene in ways you couldn’t predict. I can’t count the number of times I’ve packed up my bags, walked away, stopped to think about it for a minute, then left while thinking ‘it’d be a pain to go back’. This might seem like a totally normal thing to do. After all, your gear is all packed up and the location you were shooting at is like 200 meters from where you’re currently standing, that’s like 656.16 foot-long subs away. However, in recent years, I’ve made an effort to go with my gut when it tells me to go back. Most recently, on one of my trips to Yamanashi, I was standing by my car, gear already inside, when I decided to turn back and look at Mount Fuji one last time before heading to my hotel. I had that same internal discussion I’ve had so many times before. ‘it might be worth it to go back’. ‘Do I really want to drag all my gear all the way back there?’ ‘That is so many foot-longs’. However, on this particular day, I decided it was worth it, so I grabbed my gear, and headed back to the beach I had been standing on. I ended up staying for another 45 minutes or so as the light continued to change over the scene, and it was in those moments that I captured two of my favorite images from the whole trip. However, even if I hadn’t captured any more images, there’s not a much better way to spend a crisp spring morning than taking in the sounds and sights nature has to offer.
While none of these changes are a magic bullet, they have helped me increase my rate of success, and more than a few of the images in my portfolio are a direct result of these changes. I hope that you will find some or all of these helpful. If you’ve made changes to your mindset to increase your chances of success, I’d love to hear from you.
Thanks as always for reading