Do it for you.
I was scrolling Twitter today and I came across a tweet from a photographer I follow. He had posted a before and after of a photo he took at Zion National Park in Utah (of the NPs I’ve visited, it’s my favorite). His edits were amazing, so good in fact that I couldn’t help but feel jealous. This isn’t a new feeling for me, I often feel envious of fellow creatives, especially when they create something what I consider well above my creative abilities. Usually I take this envy and channel it into motivation, but this time I dwelled on it a bit differently.
Almost exactly two years ago I was actually in Zion, part of a trip with two of my best friends. The trip was intended to get one shot: Horseshoe Bend in Page, AZ. When we were at Horseshoe Bend, we were able to park right there, for free, and take a short little hike down to the canyon. It was packed. Tour buses and RVs and SUVs all packed in this little dirt lot. The trail was hardly such, just a worn path from all the visitors. However, we noticed change on the horizon. There was construction equipment everywhere. The National Park Service was building a proper entrance (and probably collecting a an entrance fee) and developing an actual trail down to the canyon. Horseshoe Bend had been there long before the first human eyes saw the 180º turn the Colorado River makes. Why did the NPS not begin developing the area for recreation until 2019? One simple word: Instagram. Everyone wants a photo of Horseshoe Bend, this crazy canyon they saw on their phone.
These days everything has been photographed, geotagged, and logged. You can find a photo of nearly anywhere in the world in a couple seconds. I’m only 23 yet I’m still older than Google. I’m coming of age in a brand new world of immediate access to an infinite amount of creative work, and it feels like everything has been done before. The way you learn about a cool photo spot is by looking at someone’s cool photo of that place, online, already there. If you have an idea for something, chances are someone else has done something similar and you can find out with a couple of taps on your phone. It feels impossible to be original.
I’ve written about this before, about how it’s okay to copy because it’s never going to be exact. Copying is the first step, and eventually you’ll find originality.
But there’s something else I’ve been trying to put my finger on. And I think it lies in the motivation.
My motivation, without me thinking about it explicitly, has been to take a photo and post it online and see people’s reactions. This, I think, is my first problem. The issue lies not in the sharing of photos and experiences, but in the eventual comparison to other creators. The photographer I mentioned at the beginning who took that insanely cool photo in Zion? I took pretty much the same photo. I was on that same trail. I knew the spot immediately. I shot and edited my own photo of that spot two years ago, and it pales in comparison. My photo is still great by all accounts, but it’s no contest.
If I continue taking photos just to try and impress others I’m going to be miserable. Because if there’s one lesson to take away from social media it’s that there is always someone you think is “better” than you. I post my photo of Horseshoe Bend on Instagram, and there’s already hundreds of thousands of “better” versions on there. I look at a great photo that someone took from Zion and I think that I never will make a photo look that cool, so why even try.
Social media can create this mindset that because there are other people out there doing the same thing that it’s already been done and you can’t do it too. It makes me think that because someone else already made a cool photo somewhere that I can’t or I shouldn’t.
I think my motivation needs to be using photography as a receipt of my own adventures.
When I think back to that trip to get that shot of Horseshoe Bend, I actually rarely think about that photo itself. Even though that was the reason for the trip, it’s never really something I dwell on. Instead, I think about the peanut butter sandwiches in the back of our rental Hyundai Accent, and blasting Bleachers on the radio as we zoomed down the highway in the middle of nowhere. The photo itself stores the memories I had with my friends, and how badly I want to do that trip all over again. That’s what my photography needs to be about. Sure, it can be a motivator or a reason to go, but it’s never the main takeaway. The photos in my albums or on my walls are conversation starters, to remind me of who I was at that time when I hit the shutter button. To remind me how I felt in the moments right before and after the light hit the sensor. It doesn’t matter if some guy on Instagram spent hours on a beautiful edit and how my similar photo compares. What matters is I had the opportunity to be in that place, with my camera, and I made the choice to remember that moment. And that moment is now mine, no matter how similar it looks to anyone else’s. It’s not better or worse than anyone else’s either. Life is just made up of moments, and photography allows us to capture, save, and cherish them for as long as we live.
Don’t take photos for other people. Do it for you.
