I feel like in certain locations where winter seems to drag on and on people lose motivation for photography. During winter I try my best to get outdoors but this times its a lot more challenging with the extreme cold temps, snow that is waist high makes it difficult to really do anything or want to do anything outdoors.
I feel pretty burned out from photography and I feel like I never gained any traction.
Perhaps you need to go elsewhere, travel around.
I get more stimuli when I get somewhere else on citytrip or vacation.
Most of my photo opportunities come unplanned, by accident.
Btw, it's summer now! Get out for cycling or other activities!
How are you doing lately now?
It's really discouraging when you see folks pick up the camera and a year later they are already doing exhibitions and in art galleries.
Whereas I been rejected from them.
I'm simply not an artist. Just a guy with a camera, or well had a camera.
I never got my work in a gallery before. Never planning to.
Most of the work I see on exhibitions are superficial, but the mainstream visitors apparently seem to get satisfied by it.
It's like a skilled musician that makes complicated music for a specific subculture, high threshold-audio that mainstream people normally don't tend to appreciate because they don't comprehend or is on another level.
If that kind of music is suddenly played on a low-quality pop radio channel, the musician wouldn't feel it like a compliment. He could even get offended by it.
Social media played a huge role for me, it gave me motivation to go shoot and now that's pretty much all gone, I have little desire to even take photos anymore. Sometimes I get the itch and who knows maybe this long break I'm taking will be a good thing in long run.
Social Media can do a lot of harm. It's nice to use the technology for some benefits, but it has lots of disadvantages.
Yesterday I read somewhere: "Social media is curated and creates a new reality. It's not the reality that's good for you."
I can see some similarities with porn. Most of it creates another reality too.
Both work on your brain and produce dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, ...
Both can work compulsive and addictive. Which really isn't good, it's engineered to consume your time. Time that is better spend on learning new crafts or hobbies.
What bothers me on Instagram is that every 2 posts I see an advertisement or promoted post.
I see too much influencers posting zillions of times video content about their superficial lives, videos about how they prepare their next video, unboxing the stuff they buy, ... If you go offline for 6 months and come back, you see them post exactly the same things.
I recently started calling this "junk".
I see similarities with junk food.
And hyperprocessed foods aswel, created to satisfy quickly but without a sufficient amount of nutritional values.
It's fast digesting and you'll get hungry soon after.
Much of social media content is junk, low quality, fast consumed information, carousels of max 30 second videos. The brains will get rewired to a short focus span when using social media for a while. Tiktokification.
I happened to notice that I had around 6K followers, and 80% of them were not active anymore... since 2019 or so. I started to clean up, unfollow people, too time consuming, I ended up deleting my account, forever.
(I made a spare account before I did that, following only a small amount of people I did care about from the last years, just to stay connected with them, but I deleted the app on my phone, perhaps I reinstall a couple of times a year to see important messages from them, or to upload something exceptional.)
There's much to say about all this above, I could go on and on... but currently reading the book "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport. It has very interesting insights.
Next will be the book "Dopamine Nation" by Anna Lembke.
Social Media really works too compulsive and addictive (for me) and time consuming.
I'll try to spend more time in learning craft and creating music,... but then when finished, I need to spread it to the outside world, via Social Media again? (as I'm not a live gig player, but merely studio guy)