Creative Block
Back in January, I looked back at my work from 2022 and reflected on the past year. I felt deeply satisfied by the body of work I had created and thought I had honed in on my artistic style. At this rate, I thought, 2023 is going to be a banner year. It can only get better from here, right?
Instead, the new year brought along a healthy dose of humility. For the first time since I started shooting film again, I found myself in the photographers’ equivalent of writers’ block, “photographers’ block,” if you will. Part of it arose out of circumstance. A never-ending barrage of winter storms, increased workload at my day job, and a second bout of Covid all conspired to keep me away from venturing outdoors and photographing as much as I would have liked.
In more creatively fulfilling times, I find new photos come easily to me. Maybe I’ll spot a flower or a trail leading up to a potential viewpoint, and I follow my curiosity until I find the right elements for a photograph. However, when I did have the time to go out, I couldn’t find my groove. My knack for finding and making photos seemed to vanish, like the basketball talent of Charles Barkley and Patrick Ewing in the movie Space Jam.
I began the new year feeling a bit rusty. I didn’t start my first roll of film until February, when I visited Muir Woods and Mount Tamalpais after a series of winter storms. Though I had taken a few decent photographs, at the time I thought it wasn’t my best work, and I wanted to do better.
I planned a trip to the Eastern Sierra for the end of the month. In the past, my trips there kept me excited about finding new scenes to photograph. Perhaps that might help, I thought. With the numerous atmospheric rivers hitting California, I felt like I had to photograph some stormy winter scenes. If all went according to plan, I would stay in Bishop, then drive up during the daytime to photograph Long Valley, a volcanically formed valley just east of Mammoth. I had photographed the area a few times before in the summer, but I specifically wanted to photograph a winter sunset.
A few days before, weather forecasts predicted another major storm would roll through California during that weekend. Temperatures dipped so low across the state that snow fell in the mountains around the Bay Area. However, the storm also threw a wrench into my plans. Not only did it force the closure of Highway 395 from Bishop to Mammoth, downed trees and power lines also blocked the route south of Bishop. In other words, I was trapped.
With my main area of interest closed off, I struggled to come up with an alternate plan. I had been so wedded to the idea of photographing Long Valley that I couldn’t figure out what else to shoot. Despite the beautiful, snowy scenery around me, I drove around Bishop and the Owens Valley aimlessly in search of something which matched my initial expectations and came up short.
The next morning, on my last day, I drove around the Owens Valley again. A fresh layer of snow covered the entire valley floor. By this point I had given up on any preconceived ideas for a photo and just wanted to drive around and admire the scenery. Ironically, that led me to find a promising scene to photograph. While driving along a backroad, I saw a thin layer of clouds move across one of the peaks in the Sierra front range. I left my car and began walking around, looking for a foreground to balance out the shot. I found it in some ice patterns in a roadside ditch.
After taking the photo, I spotted a herd of cattle grazing on the snow-covered pasture off in the distance. Immediately I thought I could combine both the grazing cattle and the snowy peak. I started walking and then running along the road, stopping only to check the scene through my viewfinder. After a few minutes, I found the right balance of all the elements and used my 80-200mm zoom lens to bring in the scene.
Safe in the knowledge that I had at least one good photograph from this trip, I began the long, circuitous drive back home. As with my New Years’ trip, this time it also took twelve hours from start to finish. I eventually snapped another photograph on my drive through the Nevada: a telephoto shot of the White Mountains covered in snow.
When I returned from the trip, I scrolled through social media to find other photographers’ pictures of the Sierra and looked enviously at their work. Though I loved the photos, in the back of my head, I couldn’t help but think, “I wish I had gotten that.” By the time I received and reviewed my film I thought my trip had been a bust. Sure, I had a few fine photographs, but they didn’t seem to outweigh the time and money I had spent, and they sure didn’t look as good as the ones I saw on Instagram.
The envy motivated me to venture out to photograph. As winter turned to spring, I sought out scenes with rolling green hills and wildflowers, sure in the belief that the next photo would make me feel satisfied. Despite burning through several rolls of film on multiple trips, I only managed to produce a few publishable pictures. Frustratingly, I still felt like I wasn’t producing my best work.
I decided to switch up my gear choices. I ditched my heavy, autofocusing Nikon F4 and retrieved its lighter predecessor, the F3, and a roll of Kodak Ektar. I had first started shooting on film again with a manual focus camera loaded with Ektar. When I first started shooting film again, I enjoyed the process of working with a camera without the modern accoutrements of advanced metering and autofocus, and Ektar’s bright, vivid colors hooked me in. With this camera and film combination, I was going to go back to basics. Perhaps a change of equipment would help.
I brought the camera with me on a few sunset hikes in Tilden Regional Park. After a few fits and starts, I reacquainted myself with the F3 and managed to snap several decent photos. However, I still felt dissatisfied. The camera wasn’t the problem. I found reasons to nitpick every composition. Maybe the flowers in one photo weren’t vibrant enough; or perhaps I thought the angle in another left too many distractions in the frame. I kept comparing my pictures to others’, or to idealized versions I had in my head.
After a particularly frustrating sunset, I contemplated hiking up again for sunrise the next day. I generally don’t photograph sunset and sunrise back-to-back unless I’m on a trip somewhere, and certainly not when I had work the next morning. However, I felt determined to shoot my way out of my creative block.
I woke up the next morning to a blaring alarm, regretting the choice I had made. As I laid in bed, I halfheartedly checked the webcams in the park to see if I could discern the weather conditions. I could—and saw a light layer of fog hovering over the hills. The weather conditions looked somewhat promising. Well, I thought, I’m already up so I might as well give it a shot.
I drove up to the trailhead and found I had the trail all to myself. As I hiked uphill through the woods, I reached a clearing with a wide-open view to my east. The first hints of light began to appear above Mount Diablo, the tallest peak in the East Bay. I had my mind set on photographing wildflowers, but I reasoned to myself that I could spare a minute or two for a shot. I equipped a 75-150mm lens on my camera and snapped a few frames as the fog rushed past me, alternately obscuring and revealing the peak.
For the first time in a long while, I felt confident about the picture. Crucially, it came not from a preconceived image I had in my head, but from allowing myself to try something different. The confidence allowed me to ease my expectations from that morning. Though I would still try to photograph wildflowers, I kept my eyes open for other subjects.
I made it back to a hillside from the day before and saw the lupine bushes glistening in the morning light. The lingering fog acted like a big lightbox, evening out the lighting. I set up my camera and tripod and snapped a few frames as the fog slowly dissipated. The mist eventually gave way to sunlight, and the color of the wildflowers started to pop.
After photographing wildflowers for the better part of an hour, I looked around and noticed the hills behind me bathed in warm, golden light. Acting on a hunch, I switched to a telephoto lens and zoomed in on the area, looking for just the right balance of hills, clouds, and sky. Eventually I settled on a composition, but thought it looked a bit too bright. I screwed a polarizing filter onto the lens to cut out some of the scattered light from the sun. The green hills now looked much more vivid.
After a few hours, I hiked back down, unsure of how many of my photos had turned out, but glad that I had at least enjoyed my time outside. When I got my film developed a week later, I felt a little disappointed by some of my shots. However, the frustration gave way to excitement about the pictures that turned out well. I felt like I had maybe found my rhythm again.
With a few photos in the bag, I contemplated visiting somewhere new. On the one hand, I wanted the excitement of exploring a new location, but I also knew that it would take some time for me to familiarize myself with the area. As a result, I had to consider the possibility that I might not find many interesting subjects to photograph on the first trip. Eventually though, I accepted the risk. I decided to visit Sunol Regional Wilderness and Mount Diablo.
On a hot Saturday afternoon, I drove up to the trailhead parking lot at Sunol, nabbed a free trail map at the visitor’s center, picked a trail, and began hiking. I selected a six-mile loop which climbed up a ridgeline and seemed, at least on paper, to offer some panoramic views. If I was lucky, perhaps I could find some wildflowers. For the first hour or two, the blazing hot sun and the decided lack of scenic vistas or flowers made me question whether I had made the right choice.
Once I got to the viewpoint at the top of the hills, I looked around, curious about my surroundings. I still couldn’t find many wildflowers around me. However, off in the distance, I saw a lone tree juxtaposed with a local reservoir. As I spotted this subject, my intuition began to kick in. I walked up and down the hillside several times to try and line up all the elements into my frame: the reservoir in the back, the tree in the middle, and a set of boulders in the foreground. I experimented with placing a polarizing filter in front of the lens, which saturated the colors in the scene.
As I hiked further down the trail, I still had trouble finding the fields of flowers I had envisioned in my head. However, I continued, curious to see what else I could find. After hiking my way through some thick brush and forest, I stumbled across a clearing in the dying minutes of sunset. The trees and grass lit up from golden hour. I ran down the trail, took out my camera, and immediately began walking around and looking through my viewfinder.
Despite finding very few wildflowers that day, I was thrilled about the hike. The day after, I excitedly set off for Mount Diablo. Again, I hoped that I could find fields of wildflowers, specifically California poppies. Though I saw more flowers here, they didn’t match up to the image I had in my head. Instead, I found some of the most photogenic flowers along the side of the road.
A subsequent visit yielded a few more decent photos, all of which came from walking around, without strong expectations, and following my curiosity.
The past few months have taught me a few things. I learned the limits of persistence. I had this notion that if I chased after an idea long enough, it would eventually come to fruition. While that might be true, I also realized its shortcomings. Persistence can lead to tunnel vision, causing you to ignore the subjects in front of you. When I learned to let go of my expectations, I found other scenes that yielded rewarding photographs.
I also realized that the wisdom of the adage, “comparison is the thief of joy.” I realized my frustrations stemmed in part from scrolling social media, seeing beautiful photos of places I had visited, and wondering why I couldn’t produce something similar. The passage of time allowed me the space to reevaluate my work. After my weekend in the Sierra, I was convinced my photos had been mediocre. I felt the same way even when I saw my film, because I had seen others’ work from the same area and associated my own pictures with the frustrations of my trip. Looking back, I realize that perhaps I was too harsh on myself. I felt most satisfied with my work when I evaluated it on its own merits, not in comparison to others’.
Most importantly, I remembered to have fun. Yes, I realize this sounds like a cliché ripped straight out of a straight-to-DVD sports movie, but it’s true! Somewhere along the way, I became so focused on the pressure to create beautiful, meaningful work that I forgot the entire point of why I photograph—to have fun expressing how I see the world. I realized that my most rewarding photographs came during the times when I enjoyed the process of creating them, of being outdoors and seeing the scenery.
I’m still not completely sure if I’m out of my slump. Navigating my way out of it has looked less like a linear, upward trajectory and more like a series of fits and starts. Though I’ve found satisfaction in my photography again, I’ve still had a few days when I felt disappointed by the conditions or regret a missed shot. However, those days have become less common. I’ll take it.