WM-490: How Photographers Can Create Their Own Opportunities and Stay Inspired | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
As a photographer, sometimes you get the sense that opportunity isn't finding you. There are no new places around you to take interesting new photographs, and you don't have the time or money to head out on a trip to somewhere exotic. You fall into a kind of doldrums, unable to move forward, and find that it becomes an incredible struggle to get the inspiration you need to create something new. Worse, that attitude often extends into other areas of photography. Your work isn’t being published or displayed because no good opportunities have presented themselves to you, for instance. Once you...
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WM-489: Good Habits are the Enemy of Silly Mistakes | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
How many times have you snapped a few pictures from the hip only to realize the lens cap is still on? How many times have you taken a few photographs, only to come back later and find spots and smudges in them because your lens had a fingerprint or dust on it? I know these sorts of things have happened to me more often than I’d like to admit. Podcast Notes: Photography Clips Podcast: Follow me: #PhotographyClips #WillMoneymaker #Photography
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WM-488: The Dangers of Sunk Cost Fallacy | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
If you’ve never heard of “sunk cost fallacy,” I’ll take this opportunity to explain it. It’s a phenomenon that happens when you’ve invested in something so that you’re unwilling to stop pursuing that thing. Among gamblers, the idea is that if they keep betting another few bucks, eventually, they’ll win. They’ve sunk too much into their evening of gambling to walk away without a win. Sunk cost fallacy isn’t just about gambling, though. It rears its head everywhere. You’ll see it in someone unwilling to sell a car they’ve invested a lot into because they won’t recoup...
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WM-487: Opportunities are Fleeting | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
One day seems like the perfect day for some fall photography—the leaves are beautiful, the sun is shining—but you don’t have the time that day because life’s other demands are calling. The next day? It’s snowing! That’s a picture-perfect example of how opportunities can truly be fleeting. Sometimes, we miss photographic opportunities because we think, “It’ll be there another day, I can always come back to this.” But, the problem is, that isn’t always the case. Seasons change—sometimes rapidly before we realize what is happening. We pack up and move across the country,...
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WM-486: Seize the Day | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
There’s one big aspect of creativity that tends to get lost in the shuffle of everything else. We spend a lot of time thinking about how to think in innovative ways or learning new techniques and approaches to art. In all of this discussion about creativity and how to be creative, we lose sight of the fundamental fact that creativity is often about mindset. That old “mind over matter” saying rings true, I think. Aside from techniques, skills, knowledge, and new ways of thinking, it’s the desire or the motivation to be creative that is the thing that drives us to make photographs. The...
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WM-485: Extreme Familiarity | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
Here’s something I’ve discussed before, though when I last spoke about it, it was a bit different. It’s the idea that we must get to know our surroundings or subjects to photograph them most effectively. Today, I’m framing it a bit differently because we photographers have a habit of always going after something new. New places, new subjects—we want to expose ourselves to as much new and unique as possible. It’s all in the name of creating new and exceptional photographs. Most of us believe that if we’re seeing as many new things as possible, we’re photographing new things that...
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WM-484: The Best Laid Plans | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
Adaptability—Being adaptable is one of the key parts of being a photographer. There are a few different ways to look at this, too. Being flexible can apply to the vagaries of daily life, the things we photograph, and even the techniques and styles we use to create our photographs. On the day-to-day level, being adaptable means being able to roll with whatever the day throws at you. Sometimes, this means you expected the day to be sunny and warm. Still, it turns out cold and rainy—thus, you need to adapt, which could mean bringing extra gear to accommodate different lighting conditions or...
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WM-483: Searching for Meaning | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
Searching for meaning is something that most of us photographers do almost by default. After all, that’s the point of creating artwork, isn’t it? To create something meaningful that resonates with the people who enjoy it. And that’s why we spend so much time talking about how to imbue our photographs with meaning. Here is perhaps another way to look at or to approach that search for meaning. As I said, this is something that most of us do sort of automatically as part of the creation process—but when we’re searching for ideas or photographs to take in the field, we’re also usually...
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WM-482: Experiential Art | Photography Clips Podcast
Photography Clips
Experience and insight is what makes each of our perspectives unique. No two of us can lead the same life. Even though on the surface, it may seem as if some of us are on very similar paths, we all experience it a little bit differently. Every person will have a different set of successes and failures, joys and hardships, achievements and ambitions—the list goes on. Our experiences are even more unique than our fingerprints. And I think these experiences can—and perhaps even should—be applied to the art that we create. Experiential art, or art created through the lens of our experience,...
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WM-481: Evergreen | Photography Clip Podcast
Photography Clips
We photographers produce an awful lot of content. It’s not just the photographs that we put up to share with the world, but also the words that we publish, too. Many of us run our own businesses or have photography as a side gig or a hobby that we promote via websites, social media, and elsewhere. Some of us just enjoy blogging, so we do that along with our photographs. The point is, we put out a lot of content—and in a variety of shapes and sizes. Now, you’ll often hear from marketers about two different types of content, at least broadly speaking. This would be evergreen content versus...
info_outlineExperience and insight is what makes each of our perspectives unique. No two of us can lead the same life. Even though on the surface, it may seem as if some of us are on very similar paths, we all experience it a little bit differently. Every person will have a different set of successes and failures, joys and hardships, achievements and ambitions—the list goes on. Our experiences are even more unique than our fingerprints.
And I think these experiences can—and perhaps even should—be applied to the art that we create. Experiential art, or art created through the lens of our experience, is the truest way I can imagine to create unique things. It’s nearly impossible to photograph something that has never been photographed before, but no one has photographed these things through your eyes. That’s the key thing to remember here. The thoughts, feelings, and memories associated with the things that you photograph are what gives you an individualistic frame of reference that no other person is going to have because no other person has lived your life.
To put this in simpler terms, let’s look at real world examples. Imagine yourself out on a photographic outing, and you want to take a picture of a tree. Millions, probably billions of trees have already been photographed. If the tree you are photographing is particularly notable for some reason—because it’s gigantic or has unique features—then you’re probably not even the first person to have taken a picture of that particular tree...
Podcast Notes: https://www.moneymakerphotography.com/experiential-art/
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