Here come the Summertime blues

Hello!

I’m still here and shooting as much as possible, though this blog certainly hasn’t been getting any love. Since I last wrote, Winter became Spring and Spring is now transitioning to (gulp) another impossibly humid Summer here in the Southeast.

Getting motivated to do landscape photography can be challenging sometimes, especially when the creativity well runs temporarily dry and ‘life stuff’ gets in the way. Harder still, I’m finding, is mustering the energy and emotional bandwidth to actually write about the creative challenges this Summer is bound to bring. I’m just not looking forward to Summer, plain and simple, and I’m really not sure how much landscape photography, or writing about it, I’ll be doing.

I know I’ll give it my best effort, of course, but the color contrast in leaves will become flat, dominated by fewer shades of green, and the forests will grow extremely cluttered with distracting foliage. Ticks and mosquito populations will thrive, and the humidity will skyrocket - hiking won’t be pleasant at all come mid-July, and probably just won’t happen in August. It’s something we’re used to enduring here in the South, but I’m still allowed to gripe a little.

That said, photography is still very much an exciting, relatively new part of my life and I’m grateful for it. I think simply knowing what’s coming has already helped me to make a nice little strategy to keep motivated. Without this, I might simply hold off until the weather improves in four months, but my development as a photographer would suffer greatly if I subjected it to that kind of down time.

My strategy to keep my shutter finger lubricated this summer is to head to the city and give street / architectural / urban photography an honest go. Last month I purchased a humble little point-and-shoot camera that I’ve really enjoyed using so far. It’s pocket-sized, so I can pull it out any time inspiration strikes. It doesn’t require a large bag, heavy lenses and filters, or any outdoor gear. I can just chuck it in my pocket on my way out the door and snap away when something catches my eye.

The camera isn’t imposing or professional-looking, which makes it a great tool for taking candid photographs because people probably just think I’m a tourist. It’s lens is a fixed focal length so it requires using my legs to get closer to the subject or position myself strategically. The lens is wide at 28mm, so every detail has to be accounted for, or omitted, when framing a shot. While it’s tiny, it has an APS-C sensor so the resolution is fantastic for capturing RAW image data (though I only really need to shoot JPEG, but that’s another topic).

For exposure settings, it offers only Manual, Shutter Priority and Aperture Priority modes which, while limiting in some ways, I find super helpful. I prefer shooting in Manual so I have full control over shutter speed, aperture and ISO. I want to be able to blur out a background to put emphasis on a subject, by opening up my aperture; or create pedestrian or traffic motion by slowing down my shutter speed. Things like that.

Finally, my new ‘street camera’ does not have a viewfinder so there’s no need to pull it up to my eye to take a shot. This means people don’t really realize when I’m taking a shot of them. I can hold the camera at my waste, if necessary, and look down at the LCD screen to compose a shot.

What I’ve done here is eliminate excuses by allowing (almost forcing) myself to shoot more.

But enough about the camera. Street photography fascinates me, especially the kind that emphasizes and makes use of strong light, contrast, atmosphere and story telling. Look up the work of one of my heroes Fan Ho and you’ll see what I’m talking about - he was a master before ‘street’ was a thing. I took the above photo a few weeks ago with my little camera, in an attempt to emulate the work of Fan Ho and other street photographers I admire, and I’m super happy with it.

I sat in this fantastic spot, once I finally found it, until people walked past. My goal was to capture a subject in the center, connecting the two primary bright spaces, and I think I did a fairly good job. Symmetry and leading lines were other things I took into consideration before ‘setting up shop’ in this public stairway. The bird in the upper right hand corner was a nice bonus.

Here’s another shot I took because I was drawn to the contrast, shapes and lines. I just really enjoyed shooting it when the afternoon sun made neat shadow lines from the handrail to my right. Nothing complicated or revelatory, just fun practice putting shapes together like a kid learning to use Lego. Sometimes that’s all photography has to be, to me anyway.

This type of photography is just good fun, and great practice, even if it doesn’t lead to portfolio-quality images. There’s great value in this kind of thing, in my opinion, whether you call it work, play or experimentation, because it can help keep a photographer freshly motivated. My hope is this will help me continue to develop my skills in preparation of my favorite seasons for photography, Fall and Winter.

For now though, I suppose it’s just a little hard to be motivated to do woodland photography, or go shoot big mountain vistas, when I know conditions are going to be miserable. Landscape photography will undoubtedly continue to happen, even still, because it’s truly what I enjoy most and want to keep working at, but I think it’ll be important to mix things up a bit this Summer.

I think ‘mixing things up’ can help any time someone’s working to improve a skill or stay motivated. It’s like cross-training: athletes often incorporate completely different sports into their regimens to help balance out their coordination, stamina, muscles, and to break up the doldrum of more sport-specific, focused exercise.

Anyway, I’m pretty excited to run around downtown and play in the shapes and shadows, when trail conditions become too brutal for me to enjoy hiking. If you’re like me and pretty much dread the Summer I hope you can find a way to keep shooting when it gets gross out there.

Thanks for spending time here with me today, I hope you enjoyed this one!