The Beginner Photography Podcast

486: How I Beat Burn Out as a Photographer

August 06, 2024 • Raymond Hatfield

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In this episode of the Beginner Photography Podcast, I talk about my experience getting out of the often-overlooked topic of burnout, sharing my personal experiences and 3 step process to reigniting my creative spark. We'll explore a three-phase process to help you rediscover your passion for photography, including shooting more, seeking inspiration, and thematic storytelling. I'll also share a valuable exercises to learning how to tell stories with your camera, like using an Instax camera. Join me in our revamped Facebook group for ongoing support from our vibrant community of photo friends!

The Big Ideas:

  • Explore Diverse Subjects: Experimenting with various photography genres can help spark creativity and prevent burnout.
  • Limit Social Media Inspiration: Relying on platforms like Flickr or photo books can lead to more genuine creativity than endless scrolling.
  • Tell Stories with Photos: Embrace longer-form storytelling through multiple images to add depth to your subjects.
  • "Plork": Combine play and work in your photography practice to keep it fun and educational.

Photography Action Plan

  • Shoot More Frequently: Set aside specific times each week to photograph anything that catches your interest. Keep your camera handy during daily activities to capture spontaneous moments.
  • Seek New Inspirations: Visit platforms like Flickr and explore historical photo groups for fresh ideas. Borrow or buy photography books that excite you and study them.
  • Embrace Storytelling: Choose a simple story idea and capture it through 5-10 cohesive images. Use an instant or film camera to challenge yourself with a limited number of shots.
  • Join Photography Challenges: Participate in the newly introduced monthly photo challenges within the Beginner Photography Podcast Facebook group. Follow the theme of the month (e.g., summer) to structure your creative efforts and win prizes.
  • Recommit to Learning: Dive deeper into a specific genre of photography that piques your interest (e.g., food or landscape photography). Attend online workshops or watch video tutorials to refine your techniques and broaden your skillset.

Resources:
Charlie Planespotting Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjwVlQqCWmI
Join the Revamped Facebook Community - https://beginnerphotopod.com/group

Grab your free 52 Lightroom Presets at
http://freephotographypresets.com/

Get Back your Family Time and Start Building Your Dream Photography Business for FREE with CloudSpot Studio.
And get my Wedding and Portrait Contract and Questionnaires, at no cost!
Sign up now at http://deliverphotos.com/

Connect with the Beginner Photography Podcast!


Thanks for listening & keep shooting!

Raymond Hatfield:

Hey everybody. Raining here from the beginner photography podcast. And today we are back with an episode all about burnout. So last month I shared how I was really feeling burnt out and I wasn't feeling well, and I tried to figure out why that was. And I did something about it. So in today's episode, what I'm going to do is I'm going to share with you my, what turned out to be a three step process for, getting over burnout, but also becoming a much more creative and in free, photographer. And I want to share that with you because what I learned was that having the space to be able to create on your own and do something new is incredibly important, not only in photography, but in other areas of my life as well. And I want you To have the same thing, but first, the beginner photography podcast is brought to you by cloud spot. You know, this cloud spot is honestly, I've worked with a number of companies. I've seen a lot of, you know, companies in the photography space. And one thing that I love about cloud spot is that they continue to invest in photographers. It is not cheap to, you know, run a software company essentially. And you can build whatever it is that you want, you know, but cloud spot has continued to invest in photographers and making your life easier for not only being able to share your photos, but also if you want to start and grow a business, they have so many tools built in to enable you to turn, you know, what might be a hobby today into a business, for. Tomorrow. So I highly encourage you to check out cloud spot. It has been one of my favorite, tools. One of my favorite businesses in the photography space for a long, long time. And you can also get a free forever account by signing up, over at deliver photos. com right now. So burnout, right? I don't know if I've ever really felt burnout in the same way that I had, a few months ago. or I guess technically last month. So what did that look like for me? Well, burnout, I think, What was I expecting? I don't really know what I was expecting burnout to feel like. I guess you never really expect to feel burnout. You hope that you never feel burnout. You just hope that you're strong enough to kind of get through whatever it is that you're going through. But sometimes Man, life is really crazy, or you put some wild, uh, weight on yourself as far as things that you want to get done and expectations that it happens. And, uh, it happened for me, for a number of reasons, but when I really look at, why it happened, well, I'm gonna get to that in a bit because I have some news. But first, again, let's talk about what did it look like? What did burnout look like for me? Burnout looked like the worst version of myself. I never wanted to, record podcast episodes. I, I, I dreaded recording them, like when I scheduled an interview, I almost like didn't want to record it because I, there was almost this feeling of like, what is this for? Like, like, what am I doing here? When I left weddings, two years ago now, I thought, okay, I'm going to transition out of weddings into another form of photography, uh, that I truly love, right? I didn't really I realized that I didn't really love weddings. I liked weddings a lot. There was a lot of pros to weddings. but ultimately, for me and my family, as it continues to grow, weekends became more important, and I felt like I was in a bit of a rut. A lot of the weddings started to feel the same. I was getting older than a I was in this weird phase where, like, I was older than, you know, young couples, say, you know, 20 to, you know, 26. Uh, but I wasn't as old as older couples, maybe a second marriage, say, like, 40 to 50. So I was in this really weird stage. And again, I just wasn't connecting with it as much as I once did, and I wasn't getting the enjoyment out of it. And it was stealing every single Saturday of mine. and again, with kids, it became more and more important to have those weekends. So I made the decision to leave weddings. And a part of that decision, I was scared because I didn't know what the future was going to hold for me as a photographer. I always like to know. Where I'm heading. Uh, I like to. have a plan. I like to have a plan that's very flexible. I like to know where the destination is, but I also like to explore different ways on how to get there, if that makes sense. So it doesn't have to be take this road to that road, to that place, to this place, and then you're at your destination. It can be a little more difficult. be a lot more flexible, and that's just kind of who I am, I guess, as a person. So, when deciding what is it that I want to do next in photography, I struggled quite a bit because there's a lot of options, you know, what do I want to get into photography for? Do I want to get into photography for, Do I want to get into photography purely as a creative expression? Do I want to get into photography to change the world? You know, there's a lot of different reasons why you might use a camera to do something. And I guess I just really didn't know what that was. So one thing that I do is that when I don't have a clear answer, I just, tend to push it off until a clear answer comes to me. So what that looked like practically for me was that I had no direction in photography. Um, and for almost an entire year and a half, I'm still speaking to photographers about photography. And while, you know, the, these conversations were interesting. I wasn't, my heart wasn't in it as much as it should have been because I didn't have a direction in which I was going. So. It slowly started to become a little less fun, right? Just a little bit, because I still, again, got to have interesting and great conversations with individuals who maybe I wouldn't have, without a podcast. But, In my own personal life, when it came time to actually shooting, I just wasn't shooting a lot. So what did I do? I buried myself in more work. I buried myself in more podcast stuff, scheduling more interviews, you know, moving the community off of Facebook into our own, private community on Heartbeat. That didn't go too well. and just all sorts of things. But, It wasn't photography. So, again, we transitioned the group off of Facebook, onto our own community. And, you know, it just, it just didn't go as well as I had hoped that it would. and then honestly, like, I don't know if anxiety is the right word, but like I started, you know, I'll just say that it's anxiety. I started to get anxiety over like, what did I do? You know, I screwed it up for these people. Um, there was this great place for people to connect online and, you know, ask questions and be able to share photos. And now it almost felt as if I took that away from you. And then less and less people were showing up to the community because honestly it's just hard to be a part of something new. You know, start that new habit of trying the new app, going to it daily, you know, all of those things. Changing up your routine that I slowly started showing up less and less as well. And then I didn't have anything else that I was doing as far as like photography because I felt, I felt bad. I felt as if I had, I had Ruined it, and that feeling inside it hurts. It's scary. Um, because there's, here's this thing that I love so much photography. I love looking at images. I love talking about images. I love, going out and trying something new. I love, uh, the exploration. I love how, when you go out with a camera, you're not exactly sure what you're going to get, but when you get back and you have something incredible, there's nothing like that feeling in the world. And. Here I was not doing it. For months, because one, I didn't have a clear direction on what I should be shooting. So I just didn't have, a reason to pick up my camera. I had to like, think about these things on the fly, and that's not really like, where I do best. So I felt burnt out. I wasn't shooting. I wasn't communicating. I didn't, uh, you know, the, the, the community wasn't what it once was. And it's like, I felt like I didn't have a place to share these feelings and ideas and just continue to be surrounded by photography that it just went blah. And I don't know how to explain it anyway. Other than that, but everything in my life just felt very overwhelming, right? Summer comes, we got softball, we got, you know, trips planned for summer. We got all of these things on top of having my wife and I, you know, full time jobs that there just wasn't any room left over for, for photography. And I didn't feel like having conversations about photography anymore, but I thought to myself, I love this thing so much. I can't give up the, I can't give up the podcast. I can't stop doing it. I have to continue with the podcast because I love it so much. What I'm feeling right now is not how I've always felt about photography. And that told me Oh, you need a break. You need, you're burnt out, you know, and it all stemmed from not having a creative release by not shooting, by not having, you know, a definitive why in photography. And there's that phrase, you know, all work and no play makes, makes Jack a, uh, I don't know the rest of it. Now that a doll boy, there you go. Uh, and in my case, it was, you know, um, all work. And no, play makes Raymond a burnt out boy. So what I needed was more play. I was working too much, feeling like I was getting nowhere. I needed to play. I needed to play and have that creative release. and be able to do something. Create something. Make something. Do something with a camera that fulfills me. So, uh, I got to work, right? I had to figure out, okay, if I'm feeling burnt out now, how do I get to a place to where I'm not feeling burnt out? How do I get to a place where I was my most creative self? So that's where this three phase process kind of starts. And it all starts with phase one, which is just to shoot more. So phase one, phase one is to shoot more. So when I, I end every podcast episode with the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer that you will be tomorrow. And that's true. Being a better photographer, being a photographer who, uh, you know, enjoys going out and shooting, you have to actually do the thing. if you have never picked up a camera in your life, but you've watched every, you know, tutorial or video about photography on YouTube, you're not a photographer. You may know a lot, but you're not a photographer until you actually get out and shoot. So I started thinking about. You know, the core of the problem is that I wasn't feeling creative. I didn't have this creative release. So what I needed to do was figure out when in my life have I felt the most creative. And when I sat down with this one question, it came back honestly, pretty quickly, that for me, I felt most creative in those early days of COVID. Right. And the reason was, is that it was not simply having free time. It was just simply because I was shooting more. Now, weddings were postponed. Some weddings were cancelled. Luckily, I didn't have any weddings that were cancelled. They were just all simply postponed. They were all pushed back. So, I still needed to keep my skills sharp for weddings. And at the same time, the Fuji X100V came out and I had just bought it. So it's like I had this new camera, but I had no professional weddings to shoot. So I had to figure out, okay, what am I going to shoot? So I was just shooting anything and everything that I could, things that normally I would have never shot. I would have no intention, no desire, no, you know, I wouldn't even think about picking up my camera. I wouldn't look at it twice. And suddenly, I was forced to shoot all of these things because I had to. I had to justify this camera that I just bought with no weddings, you know, scheduled. and we had this time as a family and I knew that it was this interesting time in history that I wanted to document it. I wanted to, document what our lives looked like, uh, what it was that we were doing, everything that was my life. I knew that I couldn't. You know, go to New York and be in like the, the, the, the hub, ground zero of what was going on. I had to document my life, the changes that were happening in, to me, what I was seeing. And what that meant was that I was seeing new things, right? It wasn't necessarily the subject matter. It became purely a numbers game. The more that I shot, the more in the groove I was. There's that phrase, you know, a rising tide lifts all ships. And that is exactly what it was like. Everything that I shot was better because I was I was game ready because I had just been shooting everything. and this is everything from, you know, slow shutter drags, which honestly, one of my favorite photos I've ever taken, uh, was from this period because I was just trying a slow shutter drag while my son was riding his bike. to double exposures. I had never really tried double exposures before, but suddenly I thought, well, why not? It's not like I'm at a wedding and this is high risk, high reward. and if I screw it up, it's, you know, the end of me, I could literally just try something new. And it was creating those double exposures. It was, it was doing the shutter drags. It was trying a ton of new things, right? And then. July has just historically been a very busy time for our family. Um, one, it's summer, so we're just out more. So we just go more places. And now, yeah, no longer talking about COVID. Now, It's softball for my daughter, like all of July. We haven't had a single weekend because they've all been softball tournaments. Friday there's scrimmage games, Saturday, there's pool play Sunday. It's tournament play, right? It is non stop in a single weekend. She might play eight games Friday, Saturday, Sunday. It's a lot. We're gone all day. So. Inherently, there's now just more stuff for me to shoot, right? That makes it easier to shoot when you're out more. you can shoot more. So, softball tournaments every weekend. We also had, kind of last minute planned, a trip to the world's largest air show, which is up in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. and, again, we also had, oh, there was the 4th of July, and we had a last minute trip planned for San Francisco as well. So, it's not that I didn't have a lot of things to shoot this month, like, that made it so much easier to just shoot. So, actually, let me open up my Lightroom catalog real quick. So, I catalog all of my photos by month and year. So, in June, let's see, so in May, I took 189 photos. And by I took 189 photos, what I mean is, um, I took 189 keepers in June. I have 156 keepers. And as I record this on Saturday, August 3rd, for July, I have 647 keepers. How was that possible? Right? How is that possible to, go from such a small amount, you know, 189, 156, in February it was 91, in March it was 87, to 647. Like I said, the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be tomorrow. So you, you, just by shooting more, you will be more game ready. Okay, so for me, what was my intention? You know, what were the things that I was shooting? It was just simply whatever was in front of me and whatever I found interesting. I had no intentions. I didn't plan anything. I just shot whatever happened to be directly in front of me. And that was so freeing because suddenly I didn't have to perform. It just happened, right? So phase one, again, is just to shoot more. If you don't know what to shoot, shoot. everything. Don't even ask that question, what do I shoot? That's the wrong question to ask. It's just The right question would be, what shouldn't I shoot? You should be shooting literally everything. Shoot the, close ups of, I don't know, your airpods, or your car keys, or your Stanley cup, if you're like my wife and my daughter, or your, your laptop charger, something like that. Shoot anything and everything that you can, shoot street signs, shoot car wheels, shoot anything that you see and think to yourself, Oh, that's interesting, or, oh, I like that. Because you have to have something to start exploring. So that brings us into phase two, which is to seek inspiration. So once I was feeling good, once I was feeling hot, by just shooting, right, getting those gears going, I knew that I had to to keep going and to keep going, you can't just continue to just shoot things because when you just shoot things, it kind of does become kind of all for nothing, right? You do have to have some sort of goal. so once you get hot, once you get ready, once you get warmed up, it's time to play the game. But you need to know what game are you playing? So phase two, again, is to seek inspiration. Now there's plenty of places to seek inspiration on what it is that you want to do, or you want to try. And the number one place to not seek inspiration is social media. That is the worst thing that I have found for my own photography and my own creativity. And here's why. Even when, you know, You scroll right and say that you're on Facebook. Let's say let's let's give best case scenario here you're in a photography group on Facebook, right like the beginner photography podcast group and You find a photo that you find interesting. You never stop at that photo and break down how it was shot, figure out how you can incorporate it into your own photography, you know, discover what lights are used, ask questions about it so that you can attempt it yourself. You just simply say, wow, that is cool. And then you keep scrolling. That's because we view social, differently than when we're actively looking for a problem to solve. So for me, the problem that I was trying to solve was, Okay, now what can I shoot that is interesting? Now, if you were to go through social media and ask yourself, you know, What can I shoot that is interesting? that I find interesting, then, yeah, maybe you will find some inspiration. But 9 times out of 10, I take that back, 99, 999 times out of 1, 000, when you're just scrolling, you're just scrolling to scroll, right? So, it's a terrible place for inspiration because it will go nowhere. right past you. So where do you find inspiration? I said that there's a million places to find inspiration. I find inspiration, believe it or not, still on Flickr. Flickr is old. It is nowhere near as active as it once was. but I find that there's this The flicker is almost like this weird time capsule in photography, right? As there was this transition from film to digital, as there was new software tools, as people were kind of discovering what they could do with a camera in digital photography, because photography had become more accessible than ever before, that, uh, It was almost new for everybody in a sense. So even though it doesn't get updated nearly as much today as it did back then, I still find that those older, groups or forms or whatever they are in Flickr have a lot of really interesting photos and I find them to spark my creativity a lot more. One, because it's its own dedicated thing, I'm there for a very specific purpose, and I'm asking that very specific question. What do I see that's interesting that I might like to try, you know? So I encourage you to give Flickr a shot. The other place is Books. Books, books, books. Man. When looking through photo books, I realized something about myself. And that is that, I have been chasing the perfect photo my whole life. And it's been holding me back. You know, there's this, um, I don't remember where I heard it or if it's just common knowledge or whatever, but photojournalists, like, their job is to tell the whole story in a single frame, right? If you're gonna have one photo on the cover of a newspaper, it better tell the story of what is happening to draw you in to then be able to actually read the article. One photo. Man, that burnt me out. That burnt me out because I have been trying to do that my entire life. I've been trying to tell the story with a single photo my whole life. And what I realized is that, I'm not the kind of person who should be trying to tell a novel in a tweet. That's not my lane. I am more long winded. I like to explore these ideas as I talk. I need more context. And what does that look like? Stories. I like longer form stories. I like projects so much more than a single photo. You know, if I were to open up any photo book and there was only a single image in it, I would feel lost. No matter how good the photo was. I'd be begging for more because I want that context. So that was a huge, huge, huge mental shift for me. My whole life I've been trying to just share single photos at a time, right? When it came time to share a photo on Facebook, share a photo on Instagram, it would just be a single photo. But now that I see this about myself, that's not who I am. I need to be sharing multiple photos. Because that's how I like to tell stories. I like, I like to have one photo that's stronger than the rest, but I also love to tell stories through multiple, multiple photos. So again, that was massive for me. Now I started looking at other people who were telling stories through multiple photos. And one of my favorite examples is Scott Strezanti. I've had him on the podcast before. He is. A photojournalist. He's worked for the Chicago Tribune, I believe, the San Francisco Chronicle. His job is to tell the story in a single photo. But one of his most interesting projects that I have found is called Common Ground. I've had him on the podcast to talk about it before. I bought his book and I was going through it and it's like, it's still a series of I don't know, a hundred plus images of the transition from a family farm that was like a hundred years old into, you know, being sold to a developer and turning it into a development, like a, like a housing development, lots of homes, and like a, like a suburb. And it all happened on the same ground, essentially, this common ground between two very different People being farmers and families, right? So, if Scott, this guy who is a photojournalist who does everything he can to tell the story in a single photo also sees that some stories need more than just a single photo. Man, that gave me such like the sigh of relief that was like, Oh, thank God. Like I can now I can explore that. I can explore relationships between images. I can explore different subject matters. And it just really opened up this, this door and it got really, really, really exciting. So. What do you do after that? What do you do after you have this, this inspiration? Because suddenly, I wanted to start capturing stories. That brings us into Phase 3, Plork. About this book a few years ago at the recommendation of a friend called The Dude and the Zen Master. And, if you're not familiar, The Dude is a fictional character played by Jeff Bridges in the movie The Big Lebowski. He is The Dude. so Jeff Le or, Jeff Lebowski. Uh, Jeff Bridges, uh, essentially sits down with a friend of his who is a, a Zen Master. uh, and him talk about how the dude, the character that Jeff Bridges played, is really like this kind of, you know, whatever, let anything happen, c'est la vie, que sera, sera, kind of guy, you know, and that's it. Jeff Bridges in this book starts talking about how one thing that he loves to do is to plork. That's P L O R K, plork. He likes to plork with his guitar. And what plork is, is it's half play, it's half work. Plork, play and work. When you're trying to learn something new, right, you get interested in something. You just want to play around with it. You want to have fun. It's like this new and exciting time. But then, You also need to actually get better at that thing. You need to actually do it. And that's kind of the work part of it, right? you're trying to play with something. You're trying to just see what happens, what's possible. You play with this until you have an idea of what you like. playing is. How you figure out what you, you gravitate to. Towards right? So in photography, if I play around, with, uh, All sorts of, that might look like, all sorts of different genres of photography. It might look like food photography, you might play around with some portrait photography, you might play around with some, you know, crazy lights and, you know, uh, fashion and, you know, whatever. You might play around with some landscapes, but doing all of these different things, just playing around again, you get an idea of what it is that you like, you find what it is that you gravitate towards. And for me, the thing that I'm gravitated toward, or the things that I gravitate towards, not am gravitated towards, is it's, it's, it's time and it's. It's taking something that exists, combining it with something else that exists, and then combining all three of them into their own thing where they all stand alone. I'll explain that a little bit more in a second. But the idea is that once you find something that you gravitate towards, then you start to get to work. You go deeper into that thing. for me, let's take the example again of storytelling. When I want to get into storytelling here, I needed to play around at first. I needed to, start taking photos in more of a story faction, something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Uh, and then I can kind of put them together. So, what I did, and I'm going to give you this exercise as well, and I'm going to tell you how it goes. To get better at storytelling, I feel like you really have to limit yourself at first and then you can grow. Okay. So, telling a story in one image is extremely difficult, right? but telling an, uh, telling a story in three photos is a little bit easier. Right? Because you know that you need a beginning, a middle, and an end. Telling a story with a thousand photos is, depending on the story, it might be a bit overwhelming. So we need to find some sort of middle ground, right? now you can, get a film camera, load it up with, say, you know, um, 24 exposures. And now you only have 24 photos to go tell a story or even easier and honestly, cheaper and much quicker as well is using an instax camera. So these are the little instant like Polaroid style, uh, cameras from Fuji and. You can just buy a pack of film. It's like six or seven bucks. It has 10 instant photos inside and that's it. So what I encourage you to do is to, if you already have an Instax camera, go ahead and buy yourself a pack of film. It's 10 photos and then go out and tell a story. You're going to realize that it is so much harder than you think that it is. So what I encourage you to do is before you go out and start shooting, think about what. Is the story that you're trying to tell, and how could you possibly tell that in 10 photos? So, in my case, what I did was, for the month of July, I really wanted to focus more on family, right? My daughter, there was a lot of softball that we were shooting, but for my son, my son loves aviation. He loves plane spotting. So figuring out, how can I capture plane spotting? that's the story that I wanted to tell. My son just got a, a new camera. It's like a super zoom camera. and he wanted to go to the airport to go plane spotting. And I thought, okay, if we're going to go to the airport and go plane spotting, and I only have 10 photos, what are the 10 photos that I need to tell this story? And again, let me tell you, it is way harder than you may think that it is, because it was way harder than I thought that it was. And in practice, it was actually even harder. more difficult than what I thought that it was going to be. You're constantly aware that you only have X amount of photos left. And you think to yourself, Oh, do I want to take this photo? Or do I think that I can get a better version of this somewhere else? uh, is there anything that I could do right now to make this photo more compelling? Uh, how's the composition? How's the light, all of those things go into it. And when you only have 10 photos, when you're done, and you take that last photo, you're done. The story has been told. Was it a complete story? Probably not. But is it a story? And congratulations. You did it. So again, I took my son to the airport. I took this Instax camera, uh, and I had to make a story with 10 photos because that's all that you can do with an Instax camera. So, I highly encourage you to do this, but think small, right? Think small. Think, planting a tomato plant in the garden. Think teaching your kid how to ride a bike. Think your morning routine. Small stories, not the entire day, Think small, because if you can tell a small story, then you can tell a big story. That's what you got to do. So when I got back with my 10 instant photos. Here's the thing. I don't even look at them when I'm shooting. I just take the photo and then I just immediately put it in my pocket. And then when I get home, I look at them all. I encourage you to do the same thing because then you won't be second guessing yourself. You'll just be out there and just shooting whatever you see and whatever you think is interesting in that moment. So I got home and I had these photos and I was like, wow, this is, this is really cool. This is really interesting. And, what I realized is. Kind of what I said earlier, how much I love to play with and visualize the passage of time. So, I think it was William Eggleston who said this, I could be wrong on that. He said, a photo of a hotel in 1970 looked just like a hotel room in 1970. But today it feels nostalgic, it stands out. That's the passing of time, right? That's the stuff that I love, right? so, what does that look like for me? I have a series where, I take a photo of our kids room. Like, each of their rooms. every like three months. So like four photos a year. It's not a lot, but it's every quarter because over time we're going to see how those rooms change. Paint on the walls, you know, posters up, uh, the furniture that changes. and is that interesting stuff? Not today. It's not. If I took a photo today, I would just go up and look at his room and be like, it looks the same as it did yesterday. It'll look the same tomorrow. but when you look at it 10 or 15 years from now. Looking back, you're going to say, wow, that was, that was my room. Like, this is what it looked like. And it's going to feel very different to look at those photos. Those are the things that I love. So since that passage of time is so interesting to me, I wanted to figure out, okay, so what can I do with, how can I better show off the passage of time, maybe not today, but in the future. And to me, oddly enough, my mom, had just had all of the VHS tapes that she took of me as a baby and like a child and digitized them and send me like 20 DVDs full of videos of me as a kid. And I look at these videos that I never would have seen if they weren't digitized and thought to myself, like, wow, this is, this is really interesting. But again, at the time, it didn't look interesting because that's just, you know, What it was so I thought how can I do something with this right now? How can I focus on a small story not just capturing a clip of you know, my son Being my son, you know just out and not really doing anything, but how can I capture this as a story? So what I did was I took those Instax prints along with a number of other photos that I've taken of him plane spotting before and the next time we went out plane spotting I Recorded I just, you know, put, you know, a phone on him with a little lapel mic that I had and, uh, just asked him some questions about plane spotting. I wanted to learn more about why he loves plane spotting, you know, what's interesting about it, kind of his thoughts, tell me about some of the planes. Because that, while it may not be interesting today, because this is his life, again, in 15 20 years from now, that is going to be really, really, important. I took this audio clip and then I edited it down to about two minutes. I made a slideshow with all the photos and then I put the audio with it to make just one. video with photos and audio. Uh, and I got this idea from actually John Kenny, who's been on the podcast before, uh, he's a long time listener and, uh, this is something that he's been doing, kind of in a similar way, but I just kind of put my own spin on it since it's, it's my family and it's, it's for the now rather than what he's doing, which is focusing on the past, right? focusing on people's life experiences and what they've done. This is Here We Are. Right now. So anyway, if you want to see the video, I'm gonna send it out in an email. And you know what, it'll be in the show notes of this episode as well. So just click the link in the show notes of this episode. You can get an idea of what it looked like. But what I realized after this was that I, I wanted to share this video with you'cause I wanted to show you what it looked like and. And how you can create something that doesn't, necessarily have to be reinventing the wheel, you can take two things, combine them, and then, for all intents and purposes, create something new. And even if it isn't new, because honestly, like, everything's already been shot before, it's new to you. and you will always be able to put your own spin on something. so, therefore, Again, I really wanted to share with you and I realized something and that's that I didn't really have a way to share with you So I told my wife, right? I captured this these photos this video and I really wanted to share them in the beginner photography podcast community, but I failed hard. I failed hard with the beginner photography podcast community. And this is all this is all my fault, right? A year and a half ago, I asked you, my photo friends, how can I make this community on Facebook better? I sent out surveys. The vast majority of you said, take it off of Facebook. Everybody was done with Facebook. The anxiety that you get by being on Facebook, Facebook was also, had a ton of restrictions on what we could and couldn't do, and we had this idea to make this community just this amazing place. Have our own subsections for if you're interested in landscape, or portraits, or business, right? All of these amazing things that would make this community our own. So, I, I got to work, and, uh, I wanted to make this transition be amazing and make it go over well, and be the place where everybody wanted to be, that encouraged learning, and not So just over a year ago, that's what we did. We made the transition. We took the community off of Facebook. I said, Hey, everybody, we're leaving this Facebook ship. It's a sinking ship. We're done here. And we're going over to heartbeat. And, uh, it started off strong, honestly, like I was shocked at the amount of people who actually transitioned from Facebook over to heartbeat. And I was like, I knew it. We made the right decision. This is going to be great. but each week, less. And less people, were shown up. And I would say that over the course of six or seven months, it became a ghost town, And it might go two or three days between posts, you know? I'd try to start something, but then nothing would happen. So, I started showing up less. Because there was just simply less going on in the group and I thought like how how could this be? You know that this new community on paper is way better. It's way more personalized. It is perfect for us. It is focused on learning photography And there's no distractions from ads or no notifications to take you away from learning what it is that you want to learn. And all the while I was feeling this like huge amount of guilt for letting the community go from, from one of the best on the internet to non existent. And then I toyed with this idea of like, Oh, what do I do now? What do I do? Do I bring the community back to Facebook? but my pride would not let me, it was like, are you kidding? Like you did it. You moved away from Facebook. Uh, you made such a big deal about it and how bad Facebook is. And honestly, you're way happier off Facebook. And That's absolutely true. I'm way happier off of Facebook. But all of July. I captured some great photos, and I discovered that I want to share these photos with you. But I'm not really on Instagram, Facebook, so where do I share them? And that's when my wife says, just share them in your group. And I was like, ugh. So I told her everything that I had essentially just told you, that I had, for all intents and purposes, nuked the group by taking it off of Facebook. And she said, Who cares how much better something is if you're now helping less people? Wow. That is why I married her. She is so much smarter than me. And I mean, I always try to live my life by the motto of progress over perfection, but moving the group off of Facebook was me focusing on perfection over progress, and it hurt us. It hurt me. Photography really is just a great medium to be able to share and discuss with others, and I was robbing both of us of that. So, to everyone, let me just first say, I'm sorry. If you were in the Facebook group, and you loved it, and then I moved it to Heartbeat, and then it failed completely, and you had nowhere to go, or you had to find these other communities, and it sucked, I'm sorry. I have to take action, right? You can only be sorry for so long until you have to take action. Today, I'm happy to announce that I am unarchiving our original Facebook group and we are back. Yay! Now, if you're like me though, right? If that, if that cynical side of you is saying like, Okay, wait a second. What is gonna stop me? From from this happening again, right? you didn't like Facebook. You don't like Facebook. what's going to stop this group from turning into another ghost town again and like you're right, right? We're in election year and personally, I want to be off Facebook as much as humanly possible. So. I brought in some help to keep the community going, right? Long time community members, you know, Jim Sinicki, you know, Kimberly Irish, uh, you know, Magda Stolte, right? They are a testament to the power of the group. These people joined us as, as listeners. They joined the community as listeners, knowing very little about photography. They joined the group. And here's the important part, they interacted in the group, they asked questions, they asked for feedback on their photos, and then they chimed in when they could help. And today, they're not only very skilled photographers, but also working photographers. That's the power of this group, But it's only the power of the group when there's people in it. So, guess what? They're coming back as moderators and conversation starters in the group. I will of course be in the group, but I'm just going to bookmark the group itself, rather than going to Facebook and then finding it, so that I don't have to go through my personal feed. But, if you're listening, and you were a part of the Facebook group before it was archived, It's open come back in say hey, I would love to welcome you back with open arms and honestly I have some really fun things planned for the group as well as bringing back the monthly photo challenges And our first photo challenge is going to be for August is the theme is summer. What I want to see is your photo that best represents summer. Is it, you know, of the water? Is it, uh, you know, going camping? Is it going to an air show? And the first month's photo challenge is also going to be a doozy because I mentioned CloudSpot earlier. Gavin from CloudSpot has pledged to give away a free year of CloudSpot as well, and that also includes CloudSpot Studio. So, if you're thinking about starting a photo business, or you have one, and you just need to get everything organized, meaning contracts, uh, invoices, you know, all the communication, all in one place. CloudSpot Studio has that and you can win an entire year for free. It's everything that you need to do so, to start and get going with your photo business. I also have a number of goodies that I will be giving away, but you can only win if you come back into the Facebook group and participate. Um, I tried something new. It didn't work. And. We have to readjust and Facebook is going to be the place for the community. So, I'm really excited to, to have everybody back. I'm excited to have a place to, to share images, to talk about photography, to see your images, to, to hear from you, to answer your questions, all of the things I'm happy. To start this back up again, and honestly, I'm optimistic. I'm really optimistic that it's going to be a good thing for the community, because if I want to help as many photographers learn photography as possible, it got to be where the people are, you know, And that's where we are. We are on Facebook. So again, come back in and join, uh, you can head over to beginner. If you're not part of the group in the first place, you can head over to beginnerphotopod. com forward slash group, and it'll take you right to the, beginner photography podcast, Facebook group. So I really hope that, uh, this episode helped you in a number of ways. One, if you're feeling burnt out, no, that like. I've been there and that it's difficult, but you can get back your creativity. You can get back what it is that you love most about photography. and it's through that three phase process. Let's go ahead and recap that as well, right? Phase one, shoot more, just shoot as much as you can. It doesn't matter what it is. Just shoot to get that muscle going to start up that muscle memory. Phase two is to seek inspiration. Don't do so on social media. Go out and, Find focused inspiration after you've done all of your just shooting, figure out what it is that you're drawn to so that you can look for that inspiration, right? Go deeper into that, staying in your lane. And then phase three is to plork. After you play around, it is time to get to work, diving into what you gravitate towards and go deeper into that thing and try something new. I shared with you an exercise on how to get better at storytelling as well, with a, you know, a 30 instax camera from Target or Walmart or, you know, wherever, and then like a 5 or 6 pack of film as well, so that you can start to realize what goes into telling a story, and we talked about bringing the group back to Facebook from Heartbeat so that we can, you know, continue the conversation and have everybody in there, And offer support when support is needed when you need to ask questions and also be able to share your photos as well. So, that is it for today. I'm excited for the future here. Uh, I feel like there's a new energy uh, within the beginner photography podcast, and I'm excited to see what's next. And I'm excited that you are going to be a part of it as well. So that is it today. Remember the more that you shoot today, the better of a photographer you will be. I'll talk to you soon, hopefully in the Facebook group.