What a start to 2021! Most of the world is in some sort of lockdown, quarantine, or isolation, and travel is certainly not on the table for a little while. #TravelTuesday today is focussed on inspiration and I hope the ways I stay inspired are just as useful for you as they are for me. I’m Dave Williams, let’s do this.
1. Take a Walk
Getting exercise when we can’t really go anywhere is essential for our physical and mental well-being. Taking the camera with us helps to keep our pixel game strong, too. Even if we just have our smartphone, we have a camera. Setting ourselves the challenge of capturing a few moments from our daily exercise is a great way to force us to look for compositions and forces us to look at the world around us in a new light to get these images and to see things we wouldn’t otherwise pay attention to.
2. Learn Something New
Picking up a new skill in photography helps us to develop our skills in many ways. The key point, in my opinion, is that anything we learn will contain transferrable skills that we can take back to our usual genre, stimulating our mind, refreshing our creativity, and boosting our skillset. Photography books, blogs, and tutorials are a great way to do this.
3. Watch Videos
There are so many awesome YouTube channels focussed on photography where ideas and techniques are openly shared and discussed. Taking inspiration from others, and perhaps even living vicariously through the lives and experiences of others, is a great escape from the walls we find ourselves contained within.
4. Gear Overhaul
You can take this one however you want to. Whether a gear overhaul to you means buying new toys or simply refreshing what you already have, that’s up to you. If you want to get something new, take advantage of this time of limited shooting to put some work in and research new gear, read reviews, and make any investment as wise as possible. If new gear isn’t an option, take the time to properly clean and refresh everything, taking stock as well of what you have that you use the most or what you don’t use at all.
5. Remember Why You Started
Taking yourself back to the foundations of your photography journey and remembering why you do it, how exciting it is, how much it makes you smile, and how it unlocks the creativity within you is so fun. Reconnecting with the origins of your passion and bringing all that into the present, along with all the ups and downs experienced along the way (and all the selfies) is one of the most important ways to keep our minds engaged and our sanity in-check while we wait for life to resume.
Whatever you do with your photography, don’t lose sight of the end of this predicament and the moment we can pick up our normal lives and get back on track with the goals we perhaps set before the world went a bit weird!
Much love
Dave
