By David duChemin
In this excerpt from Light, Space & Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity, David duChemin pens an essay to help you get out of a creative rut, encouraging you to take chances, make mistakes, and just begin taking photographs–because starting is hard. This essay is accompanied by breathtaking photographs of bears by duChemin.
Starts and Stops
The hardest part of any creative endeavour is getting started. Knowing when to finish is hard, too. The messy bit in the middle can also be a challenge. But the most crucial and challenging aspect lies in the start. Picking up the camera and getting to work—even knowing how to get to work and which direction to work in—is not only the hard part but also the most important. When you’re in the middle of things, even when it’s not yet flowing, you have something to react to. If the last choices didn’t work, you change your approach. If the last choices felt right, you trust that and follow where they lead. But starting? When there’s nothing but possibility and endless what-ifs? That’s hard.
Inspiration is the obvious place to find a beginning, but it’s rare enough that I’m more interested in asking what we do when that inspiration is lacking. What do you do when your muse is out of sight and you’re not feeling it? How often have I picked up my camera with nothing more to drive me than a sense that there’s beauty afoot and I should probably start doing something with it? No bright ideas, no sense of vision, no notion of where to begin, only that I probably should.
Even in the most astonishing encounters with people, wildlife, or the land itself, we must begin somewhere. That’s usually the choice of one lens, a shutter speed, an aperture, and a place to put the camera. That’s not one choice but four, and if you truly care about your work, you’ve felt the fear whispering, “What if you get it wrong?” which is nonsense because there is no “wrong” from which you can’t back out or otherwise change course. Helpfully, changing course from a less-than-perfect first choice is direction. It’s momentum. It means you’ve started and are no longer deliberating; you are working.
The muse—that feeling of inspiration that’s so unpredictable we’ve personified it and treated as its own being external to ourselves for over 2,000 years—appears in our process only when we are working, not before. Ideas arrive in reaction to existing ideas; momentum builds as you make decisions. Right or wrong has nothing to do with it. If you’re looking for the spark you feel when, out of the blue, you think, “What if I . . . ?” then it’s a sign you need to rub some ideas together, usually the ones that aren’t working satisfactorily. The sparks come from the friction between those ideas, often felt as frustration. But when the sparks begin to fly, it’s a sign that something’s going to change, or rather that we need to change something. A new lens. A slower shutter. A stronger moment.
Beginning is everything: not where you begin but that you begin. Anywhere. For the love of St. Elliott Erwitt (for whose absence we are so much poorer), do something. Begin. We all start ugly. Every chance to make a photograph is a chance to learn how to make this particular photograph in this particular moment—and learning is messy. Always has been. Learning is reacting to failures with the hard-earned insight of what doesn’t work, of wandering into the unknown and seeing what you find and can experiment with. If you’re not learning, there’s a chance you’re just repeating yourself.
It is far better to make a dozen false starts down poorly chosen roads and let them lead you somewhere—anywhere!—than to let paralysis set in. You’ll make nothing waiting for inspiration, waiting for the idea to come first. Most photographs are not the result of one single idea that arrives just in time but of many small ideas. Some of them will one day feel intuitive, more like instinct than conscious thought, but even then, you’ll have moved on to consciously entertaining new ideas while the basics run in the background. Either way, it’s rarely one startling revelation that makes a photograph, but many smaller ideas: a little depth of field, a wider focal length, a move closer to the foreground or slightly to the left. The reaction to those decisions spawns other ideas, and still others as you dial it in. Polarizer on or off? What if you made a double exposure or used a strobe for a pop of light? None of these happen without starting. And how you start—what that first effort looks like—is probably a long way from where you will finish, for which you should be grateful.
First steps often falter. I have learned to walk four times in my life, most recently on a prosthetic leg. The first steps, weak and uncertain, looked nothing like my stride now. Those initial movements were small and searching, as if I’d never made them before. I know what walking looks like, and those first steps weren’t walking. Not yet. To have judged them as failures would have sabotaged my progress. I needed those first small, ugly steps to be small and ugly to gain skill and confidence. Initial attempts at anything are almost always embarrassingly free from the promise of what they’ll one day become. First steps. First efforts at a new language. First moments as a human being. We can argue later about the aesthetics of newborn babies, but I’m grateful most of us get better-looking as we age. New photographs, too. The first frames are often far from the final ones, but they get us there.
Start somewhere. Be uncertain, but start. Pick up the camera and start making choices. Make “bad” choices if you must; they’ll get stronger. Move the camera. Wait for stronger moments. Try a different lens. But whatever you do, don’t keep pressing the shutter and simply hoping something will change. If you find yourself stuck in a loop of saying, “It’s not working,” try asking instead, “How can I work it?”
Starting is hard, but the middle isn’t necessarily easier; it’s where efforts and ideas get refined, where the ugly first steps begin to find their polish. The middle is just as messy and uncertain as the beginning, but it comes with some momentum, and if you’ve challenged yourself enough and the challenge is equal to your skill, there’s a chance it’ll come with flow. Flow allows you to be less self-conscious, to lose sense of time, and to recognize that the choices that were once harder to come by feel more graceful. Flow is the sweet spot of creative work, but you can’t get there without starting. No one starts in the middle of flow.
And inevitably, you also have to stop at some point; you’ve got to call it finished and sign your name to it. The struggle in stopping is not in knowing how to put the camera down, but when. How do you know when you’re looking through the viewfinder that you’re done? The risk is not in working it for too long but calling it done before it’s time. There’s no harm done if you overstay the moment, but if you leave before it’s really over, you could miss the magic. You can overthink and overwork a project, but I don’t think it’s possible to overshoot it. Looking back, I’m conscious of the times I left a scene in search of something better, only to find out that the magic happened ten minutes after I left. And I am delighted by memories of wanting to pack it in and move on, but I stayed instead and was rewarded for doing so.
On trips I guide to photograph bears, I’m often asked during long moments of inaction if we should move on. My usual reply is, “You don’t leave a bear to go find a bear.” It’s not always that simple, but I prefer not to leave something I do have in search of something I don’t, especially when waiting might bring it to me. I’d rather wait out a great composition that only needs a better moment or light than look for another. Great compositions come less frequently than the light changes. I’d rather stay put.
Sometimes, waiting pays no dividends when you know in your gut that the light is gone, the magic has returned to wherever it is that magic comes from, and the moment has passed. Sometimes, you feel it strongly enough in your bones that the gamble is worth it. But you never really know. You can’t. Not for sure. If you’re looking for guarantees and certainties, photography, with its reliance on real life and its propensity to serendipity and unexpected coincidence, might not be for you. But that’s part of the thrill, isn’t it? Isn’t part of what we do as much about the hunt or the discovery as it is the making of whatever photograph that follows once we find it? Doesn’t part of the joy come from starting and not knowing where the effort will lead, which new ideas will come, and which lessons will be learned on the way to the incomparable “I made that” feeling of seeing your finished photograph?
Starting is easier when you’re more intentional about your expectations for those beginnings. Expect your first frames to be a path forward rather than the destination itself, and you’ll have more patience with yourself and the process. Rather than being surprised by failures, you can anticipate and welcome them like an opportunity rather than treating them like wasted detours. How you think about this part of the process will make it either playful or angst-ridden—the former a chance to take a risk, the latter a chance for self doubt. I know my first frames are going to be crap, but they’re necessary to get the gears moving and help me decide on a direction. It’s as essential to know what’s not working as what is. And that’s a start.
This essay is from David duChemin’s book Light, Space & Time: Essays on Camera Craft and Creativity. If you are interested in reading more about tapping into your inner creativity, the book and ebook can be purchased here and here.
Limited hardcover editions of Light, Space & Time signed by David duChemin are available while supplies last, exclusively at Rocky Nook, learn more here.
