1. Gear, Motivation, and Imagination
By gear, I don’t mean having the best camera and lens in the world. How many amazing photos do we see everyday with older or budget equipments? Knowing your equipment very well beats not having a hundred megapixel sensor. Ask yourself: Where are the dials? How and what do they perform? How can they be tweaked to give me the best performance? Which is the sweet spot of my lens? Knowing these sorts of things create a more comfortable and confident mood whenever I shoot. How many times have you missed a moment because the camera was off, or the lens cap was on, or the ISO was too high, or you didn’t switch over to a particular mode quickly? I’m sure this has all happened to us.
Motivation plays a big role in our work. We all lose it sometimes, but we must always find a way to grab our gear, feel confident enough to go somewhere, and write pixels on our cards. Forms of art, such as a piece of music, a person, a book, a movie, can all trigger your motivation for photography. I shared an in-depth article on motivation here.
Imagination has always been a nightmare to me. Many of my friends laugh about this or think I’m joking, but the truth is I consider myself to be an unimaginative person. Perhaps it’s because I came into photography in my late thirties, or it’s my own personality, but I always have a difficult time building my imagination. How do I find it? The secret is, there’s no exact formula. You either have imagination within you or you don’t. I still try to shoot and compose as many images as I can, finding inspiration in them, and hoping they will set off my imagination.
To tap into this more, I always sit down with a notebook and I write down my ideas that I could combine in a single image someday.