process Archives

I don’t think I am the only photographer with this problem, so I’m eager to hear from about your solutions! The problem? I never seem to catch up with the incredible backlog of images that I want to process. I’ve been lucky enough to visit some great locations over the years, and I have shot a lot of photos. Each of these trips has contributed to my backlog.

My current portfolio creation effort is definitely helping reduce the mountain of unprocessed images, so I feel there’s progress. At the same time, it has also pulled me back into directions that I didn’t finish exploring. Infrared photography and processing techniques is a great example of this.

This image from the 2023 Valley of Fire trip will definitely make it to my portfolio after further improvement…

This is one of the shots that I captured during an early morning photoshoot at the Swoosh Rock area. The sun’s rays light up the rock formations in the top of the image, adding more warmth there. The rather unassuming bit of shrubbery in the foreground caught my eye, so I shot this as a focus-stack sequence.

There’s a bit more follow up work to be done on this image, such as improving the overall lighting, as well as a better treatment of the sky.

Of course, this blog post highlights one of my problems: meandering. As I’m going through my images, I will often find myself in a rabbit hole of my own making. The discipline that I am applying to pulling together a portfolio might help with this.

Thank you for reading my ramblings, and I would love to hear about your strategies for your photo backlogs.

In my explorations in photography, I have been known to get into a rut, where I just don’t feel that I’m very creative or inspired. If you’ve ever encountered this feeling, I expect that you can relate. If it’s just a couple of days, it’s no big deal, but if this drags on for weeks, it bothers me, as I like generating interesting photos.

When I feel uninspired, I will often come up with something a little different in my approach to try and break out of the block. One of these is to put a constraint on my photography; this helps provide focus in what I look to photograph, rather than allowing the entire world to be my proverbial oyster.

For an entire series, I restricted my images to only be square. While this doesn’t sound like much of a constraint, it did help me look at everything a little differently to get compositions that might work in a square format.

And, as you can see, rust is never a bad thing either!

I’ve restricted subjects, as well, or do a series of photos of the ground… And, yes, I’ve even forced myself to do different things with my camera, such as zoom blur, which led to an entire series of abstract images.

What kind of things do you do to break your inspiration free of its bonds?