I am a photographer, but I am not photographing...

Does not photographing mean you aren't a photographer anymore?

Hello fellow photographers

For many years now, I have called myself a variation of one of the following…a professional photographer, a photographer, a lensman, a chaser of light and that is what I have loved doing, taking photos, of just about anything.

In the past two years, this has changed. We have had this global pandemic and much of our world was shut down, locked down or shut up. We had to navigate a new way of living, thinking, eating, working and even enjoying our hobbies. For some, this was not a big change, for others it was pretty life changing and for me, it was a gradual change, let me tell you what happened..

Over the past few years of my photography career, I started to specialize in hotel and venue photography. I had built up a good client list of hotels and venues in Vancouver BC and had regular shoots coming in. In 2019 I had worked on a project to photograph a national chain of Canadian hotels and was fortunate enough to travel the length and breadth of this country to shoot 50 hotels. It was amazing, lots of hard work, but I have been fortunate to see pretty much most of the big and medium sized cities in Canada and photograph there. This was my goal, this was what I had been working towards and now, with that project in my portfolio, I was hoping that other similar projects would open up. I was right, I got a request from a large hotel group in India and they wanted me travel to India to shoot their massive conference venue in New Delhi, things were going in the right direction. Then, things changed.

In March 2020, the rumblings of a new virus began to take hold and things began to slow for me. By the Summer of 2020 (summer was my busiest time) I was taking cancellations of shoots as many of my clients were going into lockdown. This resulted in most of my business drying up but the end of 2020. What this also meant was, the next year 2021 was going to be very bad business wise. I was not sure what to do, I had positioned myself in a very niche space, a space which was very hard hit by the pandemic. I thought I could look at other avenues, Wedding Photography was not a great option during that time, neither was family shoots or portraits, so, slowly, my photography business came to a grinding halt.

In that time, it was also difficult to meet up with other people and photographers. I had a large photo walking group but, understandably, people were nervous of getting together in a group to go and photograph. Photography is very much a solo exercise, but it can be social, but that was gone too. I suppose, in many ways, like many other photographers, my camera stayed in its camera bag and I rarely pulled it out to photograph anything. I only realized this a few weeks ago, when I did pull it out to photograph some items and saw that the batteries were almost completely flat. Then the question came into my mind…if I haven’t photographed for so long, am I still a photographer? That may sound silly, but it was a serious question. I had not used my camera in a long time, sure, I took some pics on my iPhone, but using my camera had fallen away over the past 2 years. This shocked me and saddened me. I realized how much time I had lost. I felt the pangs of anxiety and realized that I no longer generated much income from photography as I now had a job to generate my income. Am I still a photographer? Should I even be saying that? What is a photographer? Was I even interested in taking photos anymore or being part of a community of photographers?

These questions rolled around in my head and I realized there was only one way to find out if I was still a photographer and that is to photograph. So, I dusted off my camera (literally) charged up all the batteries, and began to look for subjects to photograph. Initially, it felt stiff and stilted, my camera felt heavy in my hand and a little cumbersome, but pretty soon, my fingers began moving across the buttons instinctively. I felt the timing coming back, the familiar sound of the shutter click and the rush of seeing the image on the screen, it felt familiar but not normal yet. Over the next few days I photographed a few more times and it felt better still. For a week or two now, I haven’t touched the camera again and thats a little concerning. So, I have decided to document my process of coming back to photography, of coming back to being a photographer. I am not doing this out of any other reason than curiosity. I am curious about why I dropped out of it for a while and I am curious about what I will do to get back into it.

This substack is about trying to get some insight into this journey and understand how it makes me feel to get back into something familiar, but not familiar right now.

One of my last Landscape images, taken in April 2022

I am not sure what the next steps will be, I might change up what I photograph. In my spare time, I have enjoyed photographing landscapes and I will try and get back into that.

In May of 2022, my wife and I relocated to Vancouver Island, we now live in the Cowichan Valley. The scenery here is incredible and I hope to photograph some of that. I have also started a job at a local performance theatre and I hope to be able to photograph some of the shows there (which will be something new for me) so that will be fun. The spark is starting to cause the embers of the fire to kick up again and thats exciting.

For the first time in two years, I am thinking about photography again. I am thinking about it though, not as a way of making money or earning an income, but as a way of expressing myself as a visual artist. This is a new feeling for me. For the past 12 years, I have looked at my camera as a work tool, something that makes me money, a job, in many ways. Now, I am seeing it as a creative tool that I need to use to express my vision. This is new and different for me and I am feeling inspired. As I said, I am not sure what I will end up shooting or where this will go, but I am excited. I am excited to say that I am STILL a photographer. I am excited to feel my camera in my hands again and create images again. I am excited to see where this journey will lead me this time, but most importantly, I am excited to be a photographer again!

A photo taken a few weeks ago of a cup of tea being brewed…