The Photography Blues — WildArt Photographer of the Year

Gail Bisson is a retired family physician from Nova Scotia in Canada who now lives the dream and spends a lot of time indulging her passion of bird photography. Like all passions, they can sometimes become wearisome and a case of the Photography Blues can take hold. Luckily, when they strike, Gail has just the prescription.

The Photography Blues

Above: Spotted sandpiper chick. ©Gail Bisson

We have all been there as photographers. The desire to get out and shoot is lost. The feeling that we will never be good enough, that our gear is second rate, or that our shooting buddy always ‘gets the shot’ starts to eat away at us. The ‘if only’ ideology sets in - if only I lived in a better area, if only I had more money for travel and gear, if only the weather was better, if only….

My first realization that I had the photography blues was when I started to dread going on Facebook or Instagram. Somewhere along my photographic journey, I had transitioned from being inspired and learning from other photographers’ work, to feeling inadequate and defeated. Scrolling and swiping through endless bird images left me feeling that they all looked the same, or they were all amazing and I wasnʼt keeping up. Where once I had believed I was a pretty good photographer forging ahead with my style of photography, I felt like an imposter trying to emulate others.

My knee jerk reaction was to try harder - spend more time in the field to shoot even when I didnʼt really want to. After all, the more I was out there trying, then surely the better I would be. I repeatedly and unwittingly set myself up for failure by going out in lousy light, or after a long tiring day at work. I would head off in the car with no real plan or subject to photograph. I always used the same lens and went to the same places. I didnʼt realize that my photography would just stay the same by my repeating pattern. It just wasnʼt fun anymore to be a bird/wildlife photographer.

I finally ‘saw the light’ and decided I needed a break. My plan was to put the camera away for a week, but this proved to be harder than I thought when news of a good bird had me packing up my gear and heading out to shoot. FOMO (fear of missing out) kept gripping me and proved too powerful to resist!

Eventually, I did my own self-intervention and decided to send my two camera bodies into the repair shop to get them serviced and have their sensors cleaned. I would be without my gear for two or three weeks - I couldnʼt shoot even if a penguin waddled into in my backyard in a top hat and tutu! I also decided to take a break from social media for those weeks. No Facebook, no Instagram, and no posting images. Social media with all the ‘likes’ and ‘loves’ and ‘wows’ is a powerful drug and I had drunk the Kool Aid! It was time to kick the habit.

No more reading photography gear blogs (like Fred Miranda) or camera gear magazines. They were the fuel to my GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) and left me wanting - no, needing the latest gear or the best software or learning advanced Photoshop skills. No more reading bird forums and critique websites that had once been crucial to my development as a bird photographer and taught me the basics and more. I made plans with non-birding friends, played golf, cleaned the house, and made some nice suppers for my long-suffering husband who has become used to solo or rushed meals because I ‘had’ to shoot in the nice evening light. I gave myself permission to have a lie-in on sunny mornings and watch Netflix in the evening. I cleaned out my photography closet. I sold many unused accessories such as an extra gimbal head, old card readers and ancient 16 GB CF and SD cards. I donated some things to young photographers.

Above: Sometimes it pays to point a lens at different subjects and to take a wider view and include more of the habitat. ©Gail Bisson

As I got rid of all that stuff, my closet looked organized and clean. I spent some time cleaning my tripod and cleaned out a year’s worth of sand caught in the legs. I sent my Gimbal head to Wimberley to be cleaned and have some of the rusty parts replaced. When it was returned, it was like new. Doing these chores made me feel I was starting afresh and with a clean slate. For me, the time off from photography was the best thing to cure those photography blues.

When I got my cameras back from the shop, I did not rush out to shoot as I thought I would. It would be another two weeks before I picked up my gear. I planned my first outing carefully and took a shorter lens to try a different style of bird photography that included more of the environment. I stopped looking for unusual birds and tried to focus on photographing common birds in nice settings. I tried to be more artistic (and failed miserably) but I was having FUN trying to do things differently. In my opinion, my ‘artistic’ images are not very good right now, but neither were my ‘typical’ images 10 years ago.

Thankfully, it has been a few years since I last had a case of the blues. I am back on social media, but I now make a point to look at different genres and styles of photography (street, macro, black and white, etc) and decide how I can incorporate some of the things I see and like into my own images. Although I would never recommend quitting because you give up on photography altogether, I do urge you to ‘quit’ temporarily to enable you to start anew and with refreshed energy. If you find yourself struck down with a case of the photography blues, then taking some time off is just what this doctor orders for you!

Gail Bisson. July 2021.