Feeling Uninspired

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. It's a bit of a slower and more reflective one today, because for once, I felt like sharing. But don't get used to it, motherf***er, this isn't therapy. I happen to be in a bit of a photography slump again, which happens to me often. You know how it is. It can be difficult to, I guess, work up the motivation to head out there and go shoot sometimes. Hard to get back into that creative headspace, I suppose. I blame Al-Qaeda, but it's okay. I thought a quick trick I could use would be to, you know, unzip and pull out all reliable, you know, some 35mm Cinestill 800T and force myself to go for a long walk at night to attempt to, I guess, bomb start my photographic eye for the season ahead. At the right time. No more light for us. Very few pairings in photography work quite as well as the Cinestill 800T at night combination. It's almost like a bit of a cheat code. It's like buying your co-workers pizza to get them to like you, but they'll never like you. Perhaps that's why 800T persists as one of my favorite film stocks ever. I've got at least one or two photos on the stuff that worked out okay in the past 10 years. A tungsten-balanced stock, 800T is both fast and furiously turquoise. It's able to capture a Blade Runner type of look with absolute ease, provided, you know, the user doesn't f*** it up too badly. So I'd watch a different video if you don't want to see that, but whatever. Let's get my bent-out-of-whack-ass out on the streets and see what I can cook up over a six-mile walk through my city. So for this one, I took out my Leica M6 and Light Lens Lab 35mm 1.4 because I didn't want to bring a tripod because, you know, carrying that s*** and setting it up sucks wet ass. 800 ISO, 1.4 lens. I could probably make it work handheld and if I can't, it probably sucks anyway. Anyway, with the sundown and blue hour slowly fading into twilight, I finally left my cave and hit the open road. Not a bad start, but let's call it like it is. This is definitely a warm-up shot. To be honest, I don't really know why I've been feeling so unmotivated photographically lately. Maybe it's just the time of year, you know? Everything's dead and I'm not really traveling much, so if I want to shoot, I gotta find new interesting subjects in more or less my own backyard, which can be kind of tough when, you know, it's just a bunch of s*** that you already know. You know, stuff you see every day on your way to court or whatever. I don't know. Maybe it's a comfort zone thing. I need to get out of it and push my creativity a bit, like maybe off a cliff or something. It could also be because I haven't shot much 35mm film lately. I've been on some 8x10 bulls***, some X2D, some monochrome, and some old 70mm stuff. It's been a weird experimental mix as of late and 35mm is the golden boy for me, so perhaps I just feel like I need to get back to simplicity in that sense. I've been meaning to shoot this sushi spot for a long time and I think I got the shot that I was hoping for. Though honestly, it's nothing really special in an objective sense. This would be a cool shot if you couldn't see the shadow of me hitting the crouch position right here and then this guy thinking I was, I don't know, dropping trow in the middle of the crosswalk. I won't lie. And if I do, you'll never be able to tell. Another factor weighing on me is like, ultimately, what's the point? To take photos and dump them on Instagram? To take photos so I can make a video about it? I love photography, but there's gotta be more to it than that. Maybe it's time for me to take on a larger responsibility, like a project. But I know as soon as I say the P word, suddenly my schedule will fill up again like a septic tank and I won't have any time to actually commit to it. I guess it's kind of like the yips in that way. I've never really had much motivation to do a photo book though. I've had ideas for them for sure, but they kind of just, I don't know, they fizzle out with time. I think it's hard for me to find a subject so enthralling that I want to focus an extensive amount of time, research, and money on it. Yeah, sure. All my toilet photos in a 3D pop-up book with holographic bowel movements would be great, but nobody actually wants that. I like this shot. Not something I'd usually shoot, I think, but it's very dark, futuristic. There's definitely something to this style, but I'll never know because I don't even know how I got it in the first place. I think what I usually do to reboot my work ethic is just drink an unhealthy amount of caffeine, watch film YouTube, and furiously flip through some photo books like a madman at the library, which always makes the local crowd a little worried that the, uh, the crack man is back. But not this time. I don't know what it is really. I just feel like I'm not hitting that high point anymore in my work for some reason. Like a threshold has been reached and, you know, what's the motivation if you feel like you can't reach the next level or maybe don't even know what the next level looks like? And being an artist sometimes is like going through heartbreak over and over and over again, repeated forever. It can literally be something as simple as falling in love with the photo you just took on location and you, you know, can't wait to see how it turns out. Consistently building it up in your head. Then you get it back and it doesn't quite live up to your expectations. This s**t has happened to me thousands of times. I'm just plain ******* over it. It happened to me here, actually. This guy walked into the frame completely horny for midnight donuts or whatever shady s**t he was up to. In my head, I thought I walked away with a total banger of a photo, but it's just kind of whatever. I guess, too, on a larger scale, you can totally fall in love with some photos that you shot, show them to a couple people, and then maybe start to realize they don't have the same impact on others as they do you. And thus, it becomes a question of, is this even really my best work? I like it, but, you know, my family and friends that I forced to be in my focus group for the rest of their life aren't really resonating with it. So in the back of my head, I'm thinking maybe I'm overlooking something about the work. It's heartbreaking, in a sense, to fall in love with a photo just because it isn't clicking with anyone else. There's this phrase in movie editing. It's, uh, don't be afraid to kill your darlings. Basically, don't grow so attached to something that you can't cut it if it needs to go. But if literally everything is on the chopping block, then nothing is really all that special, right? And that, too, can be heartbreaking, in a sense, I suppose. I've had periods in my life where I felt like I was on, photographically, just producing some work that I was, I guess, infatuated with. But then I take a month or two break and suddenly I've lost all my momentum and it feels like getting back out there to shoot is like trying to boot up an old, dusty computer. Maybe it'll run, but maybe not. Or maybe the hardware will ignite because the system is absolutely gutterfucked with software updates. But speaking of software updates, the good news is you'll never have to run them if you build a website through today's sponsor, Squarespace. 2026 is the year to set up an online marketplace and start the flow of economy back to you. 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Every website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto-generated site map, and more to push your new website to the top of the search engine results. So, it's 2026. What are you waiting for? If you're ready to build a website, you can start a free trial today at squarespace.com and if you use the code GRANNYDAYS at checkout, you can get 10% off your first purchase. Now, it might be hard to believe, but I've shot a few roles over the years that I consider to be pure gold, and then right after those roles, some work that I consider to be pure s**t from an ass. It does make me wonder if I've always sucked and got lucky, or if I need to pull myself up and just try harder. Probably the latter. At the end of the fulcrum, I do feel like sometimes I need that pain of heartbreak over my work to more or less refocus. I think I respond with action to feeling, you know, bent out of whack. Because after I'm done feeling like a total piece of s**t who sucks at everything, I typically will bounce back somehow and, I guess, rethink my work. I wouldn't have the photographic eye that I do now if I didn't. Maybe that's how it evolves slowly over time, I don't know. So hopefully I'm in that, I guess, rebirth era right now and can just start knocking out bangers again with a new lease on photography. But not quite yet. I still gotta take one more s**tty photo of the safari inn. I shot it a hundred times and just can never seem to get it quite right. Boy howdy, do I stay on trend here. I think I got it. Anyway, thanks for listening to me ramble on for however long this video is. I'll probably never know what exactly did me in in the first place, but I kinda like some of these shots and more or less I feel like I'm back on the horse, so f**k it, who cares. Let's let it rip in 2026. I guess at the end of the day you just gotta find the motivation to just get up, get out there and go shoot. You'll probably be happy you did.