I’m having real difficulty putting images and words together at the moment. It’s a bit like ‘Writer’s Block’ – except that I’m stuck with finding photographs as well! I have no shortage of photographs to potentially talk about, but I just can’t get into the right headspace to write anything worthwhile. My Take Shitty Photos post has got me thinking a lot about the creative process (and I also had the most views on my site EVER the day I posted it – apparently all you need to do is put ‘shitty’ in the title. Or head it with a photo of a projectile-pooping-penguin.). But unlike with taking shitty photos, I’m not going to write shitty blog posts until I come up on something good. I don’t want to show the world my failed attempts at writing something interesting!

So today I’m going to pick a photo that was a turning point for me, and talk about it. Here it is:

This is my friend Giselle. She’s a top-notch illustrator and all-around fantastic person. We shared the voyage to the subantarctic islands last November, along with a bunch of other amazing people.

This photograph was taken while waiting to board the zodiacs back to the ship at Ranui – the old Coastwatcher’s station in Port Ross, Auckland Island. We’d been on the trip three days, and I was frustrated. Despite the amazing landscapes that surrounded us, and the plethora of interesting subjects, I was struggling photographically.

I felt like I couldn’t see.

Reviewing my images in the evening had me disappointed with the work I was doing. I was just taking photos for the sake of taking photos (taking shitty photos!). They were sharp photos, reasonably well composed, nice light, nice subjects, but they were just flat. There wasn’t that spark of excitement about getting photographs that remind me why I’m a photographer.

It happens. We all go through slumps, we all feel like we’ll never again take a photograph that sings (or is that just me being melodramatic?). For it to happen now was the worst timing imaginable. I should have been infused with the thrill of wild places that gets my blood pumping and my eyes seeing photographs everywhere.

But I wasn’t.

I was still filled with the wild excitement of being in the subantarctic – nothing could detract from that – I just felt like I had nothing to show for it.

But waiting for the zodiacs, I turned around to see Giselle perched up against a reclining rata, sketching quietly. The light hitting her sketchbook reflected and illuminated her face. The rata formed a natural frame and the trees in the background arched like the ceiling of a cathedral. The sun streaming through the leaves set them aglow.

And just like that – I could see again. I held the camera up to my face and found the composition I wanted almost immediately. I pressed the shutter release and didn’t even have to look at the LCD to know that I had a photo I was genuinely excited about.

It was like a wave of relief. We can’t always take good photos, and I know that. Sometimes our eyes desert us and everything is a picture but not a composition. But they always come back. Everything realigns in the brain and we begin to find photographs everywhere again.

Sometimes all we can do is wait.

Sometimes all we have to do is forget about taking good photos and just appreciate being.