Camel fences #1
Those of you who’ve met me or who have followed this blog for a while will know that I have always been a big fan of putting my work out there and blogging as much as possible even those times when I might not have been so sure about the quality of the images I was posting. I felt that it was a great way to “grow” photographically and be able to look back and see some sort of progression in my images.
As the blog is coming up to its tenth (10th!) year anniversary in July I’m finding more and more that I struggle to get myself to post just any kind of “pretty” image that might not have much meaning attached to it. In a way, that’s probably a good sign as it means that growth that I’ve been talking about above is working and is challenging me to produce better work. But it does make it a lot more difficult for me to try and ignore that voice in my head that keeps saying “Really?!? Are you going to post that image?!? It’s just another landscape of yet another beautiful place in the world”. Don’t get me wrong, I love landscapes and I love traveling the world to see all these beautiful spots, but for a while now I have started to need a bit more from my work.
Camel fences #4 and #5
I need more than thinking in single images and if you’ve seen most of my photographs in the last few months, they are (or at least they try to be) much more about a longer story that just a single moment in time. So that’s where my struggles lie at the moment. The weird part about it is that I can produce photographic stories for my clients when it comes to commercial jobs as usually the briefs are fairly strict and more often than not (whether you like it or not) are not particularly challenging. But when I produce personal work it all becomes ten times more difficult because I am my worst critic. I also think a problem I’ve been having recently is that I need more and more the human element in my photographs. I keep finding myself looking at landscape photographs (or even architecture or interiors) and think that they are missing that human presence.
Camel fences #4
By this point you might be asking yourself what’s the point of this post. Unfortunately, it’s more for myself, writing it as a way of getting it off my chest, but at the same time, I also hope that it might help some of you as I don’t think enough photographers talk about the struggles of photography and how to move from taking a photograph to making a photograph. So, as I embark for the USA and Cuba tonight, I will try to look for those series of images and from what I hear Cuba is the perfect place for this.
As for the photographs in this post, it’s yet another mini-series of images I made at the Al Dahfra Camel Festival back in December. It depicts camel owners or farm helpers waiting behind the fences of the main camel beauty competition area, hoping their camel will be the one winning.
Camel fences #5
