What to do if one's stuck?

" I wait for the pictures but when I see them, I really dislike them. "

What don't you like about them, composition - or technical stuff like exposure, focus, DOF ?

Or, if you have to send-out for processing, maybe you're getting crappy processing & printing ?

I 've had bouts of lousy processing locally, that really frustrated me... made me think my Exakta and Leica III were junk...

If "Composition" is your nemesis ( it seems to be my arch-enemy! ), that is an "internal problem"; if it is bad processing, try shooting B&W and processing it at home...

Most of my motivation to take pictures comes from a fascination with gear, and using the antique and odd-ball cameras I've accumulated.

Now that I'm in my 40's, I also have a desire to create photos that "other people want to look at"...

One of my recent inspirations ( equipment-inspired ) is to take my 1890's Premo wood and brass cameras, and take photos with them ( on slow ortho film ), soup it myself, and contact print (using the wooden printing frames) on old-fashioned "printing-out" paper, perhaps even toning them... trying to go through the whole process as it would have been experenced by the ambitious amateur a hundred years ago...

For whatever reasons, I'm strongly attracted to "fiddly", archane machinery and processes...

Also, I look at lots of century-old photographs, taken with fairly crude equipment, and say to myself "surely I can do as well"...

Sometimes, switching gear can break our "muscle-memory"... and help us get out of a rut...
 
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Warning: possibly irrelevant post 😀

Mike Johnston once wrote a blog post and said that everyone getting into photography must, at some stage, fill in the dotted line: I do photography because.........................................

Some philosophers believe that happiness is the pursuit of a dream, such is human nature.
 
Spyro said:
Warning: possibly irrelevant post 😀

Mike Johnston once wrote a blog post and said that everyone getting into photography must, at some stage, fill in the dotted line: I do photography because..........................................
Click to expand...

...I can't see an alternative.

Cheers,

R.
 
carrying my camera every single day every where i went and trying to make mundane things interesting somehow helped me get better at realizing why i'm taking pictures of something; what makes something/someone/a scene interesting? or worthy of being captured
 
I like all the advice given here.

I uses maths: I shoot more and increase the number of keepers. From the keepers I try to think why I created that look and then I try to reproduce it again and again.

From my recent roll (I shoot about 3 to 5 rolls a week), I managed to get one single keeper:

A wedding prayer.



raytoei
 
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