VISION DRAIN vs MINDSET vs CREATIVITY

Spiti Valley Mountain Scape

am not alone to undergo this … but still feels like am not there yet and I very badly need a break to rejuvenate.

Having read David Duchemin’s blog this morning about “Blurred Vision” and especially this part of the post ..

“The downside to believing that our photography is an expression of our vision, and that photographic vision is connected to our personal vision, is that what’s going on in our personal life can affect our work, in some ways it must affect our work.”

I started to feel that it is very true. Over the past few days/weeks the pressure and circumstances both in professional and personal life has had a direct impact on my outlook with respect to both photography and also processing. Probably this also answers many of you as to why am not posting much images in the gallery from my previous trips. I am a firm believer of the fact that you need to have a right mindset to go out and create something different and when am not in one i hardly bother to open my camera bag how ever far i am from home and even if am on a trip which i would have gone  specially for photography. Creativity and doing something new and different comes only when you are in best of your mindset and mood.

There are so many sources of “inspiration and influences” on the web be it from syndication or twitter or facebook or what ever – but try to follow that or trying to imitate that means that you are not doing something on your own but instead trying to build someone else’s vision/thoughts using your camera.

How often do you guys face such situation when you pick up your camera and capture something which later you realized is not what you wanted to ? You sit to process some images and later realize you have spent hours doing something to make something which shouldn’t have taken even few mins or in other words what you have done is not what you wanted to ! How often do you feel you don’t want to get bombarded with thoughts that you should stop seeing images on social networking which you know will never impress your mind nor will inspire you to do something different yourself? Is it because of your mindset at that moment which is not permitting you to do anything which you wanted to ?

What do you do in such time ? Still go ahead with seeing what your mind can do without knowing what it should do ? Or just relax and take it easy and wait for the recovery mode to set in ?

For me as of now,  am thinking of getting into something like spending time with books (which in itself will be a diff blog post) and music and thinking of other stuff for future which includes sorting things out which has caused this vision-drain.

For better side of things i have moved myself to a new iMac and this means i have to setup my digital-dark-room all from scratch again and it also means i will have to wait for another 2-3 weeks for Adobe to ship my mac copy of Photoshop and for me to get all those plugins which i wanted or like to use. So this wait / break period is a blessing in disguise for me to start looking into a new DAM workflow that i was thinking of implementing and let me see how much i will succeed.

Hope everyone is having a good back to back long weekends over in India and also having good festive celebrations at home.

So until next time .. dont miss me but do bless me 🙂

One comment

  1. Hmmm… I guess everyone goes through this. Currently, am feeling the same too. Only difference is.. I don’t take myself too seriously and dont mind producing crappy images time and again :-). But of late, have started feeling that its time that I stopped a bit and took a look at what I am doing from a distance.

    Perhaps you are right. Its time to break into something else and let your mind rejuvenate.

    Hope your break is not too long.. we want to see good images on this page more frequently 🙂

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