It’s been a season. A season where I feel like my creativity is in a seemingly endless pit. I’ve assigned myself challenges, tasks, adventures, tried to spin it as an opportunity to rediscover what brought me to image-making in the first place, but here I am. Here I am, sitting in this slump of feeling unable to create, unable to really express what I want to say.

I’ve been scrolling through some of my recent work trying to find something that would make sense if pulled together, and there are bits and pieces. I could talk about camping and road tripping with kids. I could talk about hiking with my camera. I could talk about documenting the more daily adventures. I could talk about this and that…

And what I noticed, in my scrolling, is how much editing I’ve actually done to a lot of my images. In the last year or so, I know I’ve started shooting darker, just generally. I don’t know where that’s really come from, but I’ve found myself seeing scenes just darker. By and large, I pull my exposure up in post, partly out of habit, partly to maintain some kind of cohesion in my work. Every now and then, though, I feel like what I was wanting to convey with the overall mood of a photo has come through.

So what does this mean? Heck if I know. Maybe I need to lay off the tweaking so much and really let those deeper tones come through. Let there be a little parsing and squinting needed to ascertain what’s going on in an image. I’m on the edge of being caught up with my client work and being able to think about my personal photos. Maybe I’ll approach them a little differently this time. Maybe I’ll let that darkness linger.

All the best,
Alison