This is part two of a two part series on rediscovering your photography mojo. You can find part one, from last week, here. 

6 Follow your instincts

Most of us have experienced the sense of knowing things before we know them, even if we can’t explain how.

I firmly believe in following my instincts, not only as a photographer but also throughout life. It’s how we experience life and it can aid in breaking creative ruts as an artist, but how you may ask? Whenever you feel an inclination of inspiration, or have an idea, pause and then follow your gut while the inspiration is fresh.

It can be extremely difficult to rekindle that spark once the moment has passed, and it’s almost always impossible to conjure up on command, so listen to the voice inside and pursue the moments and ideas whenever they arise.

You never know what it may become if you don’t at least give it a shot. 

7 Take from your mistakes

One of my favourite quotes belongs to Raymond Carver, who once said, “You’ve got to work with your mistakes until they look intended.” This quote is very fitting for anyone looking to succeed in photography.

We all make mistakes whether we are open about it or not. No one is perfect and this is exactly why we should acknowledge all those imperfections. It’s only through insisting and pretending that the errors are intentional that you can make real, unintentional masterpieces.

A good practice is to try shooting a roll of film, which is intentionally about mistakes.

Give it a shot, review each frame and see where you went wrong, but also see how and why some of those mistakes work.

8 Allow yourself space 

Most of my strongest images are taken when I am in the right frame of mind for making pictures. Typically, this occurs when the situation is unplanned, spontaneous and free to uncertainty. The forest itself gives me time and space for unexpected and introspective thinking.

I feel safe in being alone in nature, allowing for both intimate and personal behaviour to take place, which is when I tend to produce my best work. A good practice is to go somewhere you feel at ease, somewhere quiet and private. Only photograph when you feel the timing or moment is right.

Don’t force yourself to take the image if you don’t feel it. By doing this experiment you’ll realise the importance of being in the moment, and not just firing off shots until you feel like you’ve got the shot. It’s an inspiring sensation when the camera becomes an extension of yourself, and it’ll teach you a lot about yourself too.

9 Play with different gear/techniques

Sometimes mixing things up with the gear we use can have a dramatic impact on our approach and motivation with creativity. For example, maybe you regularly shoot portraits using only natural light, so perhaps you could try adding flash to give a different quality of light.

10 Set goals

One of the most common struggles for photographers, especially those who do it full time is figuring out what to do with your precious time.

Having specific goals is a great way for productivity and clarity as well as for staying motivated and inspired.

The key is to set realistic goals that are achievable on a day-to-day basis. Take a moment to think about what exactly you want to achieve, write a list and then slowly work your way through them.

It could be as simple as taking daily photos at the same location or route that you travel each day, or maybe you want to make a photobook, so set aside a few hours each day to shoot specifically for the book project. Goals will help keep you focused and motivated to create new work.

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:32:38 GMT (1696206758918)

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by SBG San Antonio Staff Reports

Sun, October 1st 2023, 11:28 PM UTC

A young woman using a DSLR camera (Getty Images)

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How can you make possibly the best smartphone for photography an even more capable cameraphone? Accessorize it!

That’s exactly what Xiaomi did for the 13 Ultra with the Photography Kit – a quirky set of accessories for the everyday phone user, but an invaluable work tool for the enthusiast photographer and videographer.

What’s the Photography Kit?

The Xiaomi 13 Ultra Photography Kit features a quality protective case with a lens cap, a 67mm filter adapter, a camera grip with Bluetooth, and a lanyard.

The whole package

You can just snap the case on the phone and put the cap on top. It protects the cameras from dust and other potentially-harming objects and it looks cool. The lens cap attaches with a push.

The grip accessory is pretty neat. You slide it onto the bottom of the case and it has a convenient locking lever to stay in place. The grip has a USB-C port so you can charge its built-in battery, a lanyard hole, and a full-on shutter button – it has half-press focusing and a zoom ring.

Press and hold the shutter for a second and the remote grip initiates pairing with the phone. From there it can launch the camera from a locked phone, control the zoom, and take pictures.

Lanyard eyelet and a zoom ring around the shutter button

With the case and grip attached, the Xiaomi 13 Ultra becomes a photography powerhouse! It’s very easy to fall into a rhythm of waking up the phone and moving between the different cameras using just your index finger. Taking the phone out of your pocket by grabbing the grip is very convenient too.

If you want to take your imaging further, twist on the 67mm filter adapter on the back of the case. This is the most popular filter thread on the market and you’ll get the widest selection of ND and circular polarizing filters around.

We happened to have a CPL lying around and we attached it to the phone to take some photos. Using a filter on the Xiaomi 13 Ultra feels fully professional. And it’s nearly impossible to twist the adapter off the phone’s case.

We found that the best use case for the Photography Kit is action shooting. It takes capturing your friends playing beach volleyball to a whole other level. Put the phone in either 3.2x or 5x, half-press to focus, and then wait for the ideal moment.

Here are a few samples we shot with the Xiaomi 13 Ultra with the Photography Kit attached.

Xiaomi 13 Ultra using the Photography kit

Conclusion

It’s hard to find the Xiaomi 13 Ultra Photography Kit online. It seems your best option is to import it from China. Prices range from around $130 to nearly $300. It’s a quality set of tools, but not amazing value for money.

The joy we get from using such accessories with a phone may well make it worth it, however. It brings us back to a few years back when phone and accessory makers were more imaginative, more daring. Remember LG and Friends, those were some fun days.

Now phones have become clinical tools. They perform a million tasks and they excel at most of them. Being great at photography is one of their key strengths. Using something like the Xiaomi Photography Kit can elevate one of the best phones around to a full-on professional tool.

Williamsport, Pa. — Photographs by Joanna Knox Yoder, instructor of photography at Penn College, were recently selected for exhibition in three juried shows — one in South Carolina and two in Georgia.

Yoder’s digital photograph, “The First President,” was selected for two exhibitions: “SlowExposures” at the historic R.F. Strickland Building in Concord, Georgia, and “Forgotten” at the Southeast Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina.

“SlowExposures” opened September 14 and runs through October. Now in its 20th year, the annual juried exhibition celebrates the rural American South. “Forgotten” is on display through September and offers artists’ representations of forgotten people, places, and belongings.

Yoder captured “The First President” in Williamsburg, Virginia.

“I had the opportunity to explore and photograph a site which contains dozens of 20-foot-tall abandoned, deteriorating busts of almost every U.S. president,” Yoder explained. “I photographed George Washington’s sculpture from behind, to emphasize the cracks and deterioration juxtaposed with the barren landscape in front of him. To me, it was a metaphor for the fear of an unknown political future. I had a lot of fun making this photograph because it was extremely muddy that day, and I got to tromp around in knee-deep mud to get the shot.”

Yoder’s photograph “Out of Bounds” was selected for the “Small Works” exhibit at the South x Southeast Photo Gallery in Molena, Georgia. It is on display through September.

A medium-format black-and-white film photograph, “Out of Bounds” was shot near Williamsport at an abandoned drive-in movie theater.

“I created this image to preserve this historic relic before it disappears and is forgotten,” Yoder said. “I focused on the old signage arrows from the theater because of the mystery that they evoke about the history of the surrounding landscape.”

Yoder earned a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design, and a Bachelor of Arts in art education from University of Maryland, College Park. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In her photographs, she explores the connection between history, memory, and place.

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I’ve spent countless hours walking streets both near and far from home with My Precious in my hand and a muscle memory for it in my fingers that made it effectively part of me — an extension of my arm. My Precious is, of course, my camera.

I realized I wanted to photograph time. You can’t see time, and you can’t touch it. That’s why it’s the furthest thing from our five senses. But with photography, I can capture time. —Miyako Ishiuchi, What Photographers Go Up Against 6: Time

Years ago I wrote about the “Zen” of street photography, by which I meant its meditative nature for me — how its practice enlivened my senses to the world around me, made me walk more slowly and observantly — excruciatingly (and often exhaustingly) mindful of the world around me. I wrote somewhere once that of every street photo I take — no matter how long ago, no matter how many 1000s of photos I’ve taken — I remember exactly where I was standing and what the scene sounded like around me. A synaesthetic frisson generated by a sea of sensory data in the depths of my physiology.

“The decisive moment” is a phrase often used to describe the essence of street photography as a practice and genre, coming from a canon work by Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1952:

Photography implies the recognition of a rhythm in the world of real things. What the eye does is to find and focus on the particular subject within the mass of reality; what the camera does is simply to register upon film the decision made by the eye[…] Photography must seize upon this moment and hold immobile the equilibrium of it. […] Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms that give that event its proper expression. —Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment

What is this “mass of reality” and how is this decision made? Consider all the variables of environment and motion at play — the light at that exact time of day, the street corner that is turned (or not), the speed at which human bodies pass each other, the direction the eye is looking for a split second because a sudden sound was heard. The height of the standing photographer. The bend of a knee or wrist.

Somewhere in all that mass, that chaos — something in the mind and finger of the photographer makes a wordless, instant decision to take a photo — capturing a moment in time that never existed before and never will again. What is that recognition of a rhythm? It’s a profoundly human algorithm.

I once hacked my own photography practice by taking away almost all my own agency around it. I built a tiny camera that I could pin to my clothes and programmed it to automatically take a picture every 60 seconds, then simply went about my day. Later, it felt deeply weird to see the results for the first time — as though they were taken of my life by a stranger, a portable paparazzo. It was a fascinating experiment in loss of control, discerning where my artistic eye begins and ends, and feeling intimately witnessed by something outside of myself.

Lately, I’ve been seeing increasingly common rules in announcements for street photography competitions that say “no AI-generated images” and the like. The first time I saw this, it struck me as odd because it seemed obvious… like, of course, [by its very nature and definition] it can’t be AI-generated; it is necessarily of physical worlds and the messy people in it and time itself. AI does not exist in time or space.

Right?

A fellow street photographer I’ve been following for years recently and suddenly became an exclusively generative AI artist. My heart sank as I’d really loved his poetic, ethereal, and unusual work that had inspired me over and over again. His new style was glossy and almost wholly disconnected from his earlier aesthetic and point-of-view, seemingly (to my eye, anyway) entirely text-prompt-based and not using any of his own original work as material. It was still beautiful and imaginative work, but it told me nothing about what he’d seen or lived. There was still much to appreciate about it artistically and technically, but I realized that what I’d loved was the stories he told about the world — and how he, specifically and as a fragile and imperfect being, moved in it.

Above is legendary animator Hayako Miyaki on why computer-generated characters are not interesting to him.

While I can be a romantic about more traditional practices — and was initially tempted to immediately throw a rope between “real” and evolving tech in street photography — I’ve come to think that any difference is ultimately semantic vis-à-vis how we categorize art. I think it’s a lot more interesting to find intersections of human and machine, and all the literal and figurative shades of gray between them. What is a camera anyway but a mechanized eye invented by puny mortals to try to capture time?

During the early years (!) of the pandemic, I grieved the freedom of being able to travel freely through my own neighborhood and favorite places in the world. I began to digitally composite together photographs I’d taken — over different years and places —to create worlds both familiar and new, like Mt. Rainier of my Washington home emerging over Tokyo. It felt like time travel and it felt true to my soul. I could feel where I was. It felt like memories and testimony of places I’d walked… that don’t actually exist. Like fusion and bottled magic. And it was all real… just remixed, reimagined.

In my day job as a product designer in tech, I started working in AI in 2017 and am as ever in awe of it, in all the senses of that word. I mostly worked in the area of natural language processing and virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri, and have some exposure to its use in computer vision (CV), consumer robotics, and smart wearables. I both enjoy and am agape to imagine how we might deploy such tools with regard to photographic art and craft. I think of the tiny wearable camera I made and what if I had glasses like that. And I think about how much I’d love to train a custom AI model (for my use only!) with the tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken over the years to generate wild new versions of my own work free from temporal and geographical bounds, soaring creatively in a world of my own curation. All that visual data! My eyes gleam with the possibilities.

I used to spend hours editing and cropping and tinkering with my photos, something I no longer do because now I just program My Precious’ settings to take photos to my exact artistic aesthetic: the exact lighting and color effects, the exact level of grain, my preferred aspect ratio, and so on. I just now just compose and take the shot and it’s done right out of the camera. It’s not a huge leap to imagine that I could train it over time to detect what scenes I find most compelling, what angles I use, how I compose and frame, and ultimately how I share my life and how I see the world with others.

But, what would be the fun in that?

About the author: Jill Corral is an author, designer, and photographer who works at the intersection of visuals, sound, and transformative spaces. You can find more of her work on her website. This article was also published here.