Ebbs and Flows

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I’m taking less and less personal photos these days. In fact, overall, I’m taking less photos for myself every year. It seems the more I shoot for clients, the less I shoot for me. Funny how that happens. When your passion turns into your profession, the spark that set things into motion seems to slowly fizzle out. Ebbs and flows, right? And I’m okay with that. When inspiration does strike, I’m on it.

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My iPhone is still my camera of choice, and I find that abandoning my DSLR in spirit earlier this year, was the right choice to make.

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Every day, I’m still photographing a daily themed photo project, and on January 6th, I’ll hit day 2000 of The Mug Chronicles. That’s over five and a half years photographing my feet “from where I stand” with my morning cup of coffee across four continents, nine countries and twelve states!

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We’re coming up on another year, and while I haven’t yet chosen a theme for 2017, photographically speaking, I’m happy with how 2016 turned out. I may not be capturing as many moments as in years past, the ones I’ve chosen to document satisfied me. I’ve found that sometimes you need to be in the trough of an ebb in order to get back to the peak of a flow. By retreating into ourselves, we allow ourselves to lay old passions to rest, while percolating on what’s to come.

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Where are you right now in your photography practice? Are you sinking down into the trough? Or cresting the wave of flow? Share with me in comments! I’d love to hear what’s happening in your world.
Holly ~ Soupatraveler

8 Comments

  1. Love this! Thanks for sharing, Holly. Love your “from where I stand” series. Right now, I’m in a drought photographically speaking and I’ve been considering doing a 365days project next year, just to get the juices flowing. We’ll see…

    • Thank you Chinwe! Droughts are good things! It’s trying not to stay their for too long that is the challenge. A 365 would certainly get the juices flowing for sure! Be easy on yourself though, and allow yourself to use any camera you want to capture it, or to play catchup posting when you need to. That will help it be more achievable, I’ve found when working on my project. Good luck and keep us posted!

  2. I’m definitely in the trough of personal work but on the peak of client work. I’m looking forward to rollercoaster-ing back into personal work in the next few months as I’ve had a few ideas brewing that I haven’t been able make space for.

  3. 2000 Mug Chronicle images. Holy Moly! I’m rediscovering the joy in photography at the moment, with whichever camera suits me!

  4. why don’t you consider coming up with a weekly challenge and share with everyone. weekly isn’t too big of a commitment and might rekindle some of (off of our) creativity! And we had lots of fun with those in the past….
    great read and great photos! i feel the same. recent trip to paris i took fully half of the images on my iphone, and found a surprising dearth of DSLR’s showing up amongst tourists as well. glad i brought it for some of the more epic images, but happy to leave the “ball and chain” behind for some explorations as well and rely on the iphone 7 and it’s new and improved camera. 🙂

  5. Where am I? Hard to tell… I feel I’ve moved forward but not where I want to go – grrr! Lovely motivational food for thought, Holly.

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