The Redesign
After a period of reflection a few months back, I made the decision to reshift the focus of my website and ultimately start afresh when it came to design as well as content. With restrictions continuing to affect how and where we travel to my predominant emphasis on the sights of the globe clearly wasn’t sustainable project-wise, nor was it for my creative curiosity.
Many people, including myself, have previously discussed the limiting effects of gear envy or ‘gear acquisition syndrome’ when it comes to simply getting out there and honing one’s skills with a camera in hand, and the same can be said when we stress about the choice of subject in photography. Whilst it’s amazing to shoot beautiful waterfalls and awe-inspiring skyscrapers, it can often feel as if the job is half-done with the aesthetics of the location doing a lot of heavy lifting in the final image. Although photos like these have been some of my best work, the cynic in me feels that the plaudits arise from the viewer being struck by the objective nature of what they see rather than perhaps appreciating the creative process behind the shot.
Becoming comfortable with this approach is great if you’re privileged enough to travel on a frequent basis, but with life the way it has been throughout the pandemic it’s been easy to fall victim to the mindset that there’s little reason to take out the camera as there’s nothing worthy of shooting around us. Fortunately enough though through a continued interest in the creative space I learned an obvious but transformative lesson – a skilled artist assigns a purpose to the environment around them rather than finding one in it. By shooting the streets close to home and even the objects within it, my focus shifted from simply capturing a subject akin to a sort of visual tourism to capturing it in the best way possible.
It was this increase in the accessibility of photography that rekindled my passion for the field and through continued my practice my understanding of it grew too, thus kickstarting a progressive cycle in which marked improvements in my abilities has only spurred me on further. Subsequently with more to show, and of a commercial nature too given the use of common items as subjects, it not only felt fitting to create a space in which to display my work, but as mentioned it was time to escape the niche of purely being focused on travel content.
In fact this focus on the travel ‘niche’, I use that term loosely as the sector is huge, neither advanced my writing skills nor my photography. Bar a few anecdotes and personal experiences, the copy of my posts was mainly recycled from other travel sites to provide the context of what the image was presenting. Moreover, to create a sense of journey and tell a story, I often found myself using sub-standard images that merely served the purpose of showing where I’d been and in what order. To be quite honest though that could have been my intention back then when life looked different, but as aforementioned that style is neither sustainable at the moment nor is it where my focus lies.
Instead, I want my photos and writing to stand out on their own merit with the latter serving the purpose of documenting my journey as a creative while not being pigeon-holed by any expectations of what my ‘brand’ should be. To instigate this switch though, as well as marking a physical change in direction, my site needed a complete overhaul – a process you can read all about in my next post.
