The creative benefits of a slower approach

A recent back problem forcing me to review my approach to fungi photography has led to both a greater enjoyment of the process, and satisfaction with the results.

I think I’ve always known there was a better way of tackling the challenges of fungi photography but old habits die hard. Coming from a very busy and stressful career, time off would feel particularly precious, trying to balance time with my family with time alone doing my hobby. To justisfy the time spent I would feel I had to achieve as much as I could in a short time. I now have much more time but have found it hard to shake off this attitude.

My typical approach was to pack up as much equipment as possibly needed and cover as large an area as I could in the time available, frequently bending to peer at possible subjects without removing my heavy backpack. Spotting a half decent specimen I would take a few images from various angles incase it was the best subject I was going to find, and then move on. I would keep going until I had a large number of images to work on at home.

As you can probably imagine, this is not the best way to be creative and think carefully how about I wanted to portray my subject, and so I ended up with a lot of what I would consider ‘record’ shots. Most of these were then deleted after an attempt at processing, or have been consigned to the depths of my hard drive, and they left me with a nagging sense of dissatisfaction.

Due to increasing back pain I knew I had to make changes. Such is my passion for fungi, combining a fascination with their natural history with a love of creating images of them, the idea of taking a season off was unthinkable. The change I made was, first of all, to walk around an area of woodland with no equipment and record possible subjects on my phone using the What3Words app so that I could find them again. I would then review the images on my phone, consider how I might compose an image of each, and choose just 3 or 4 to return to.

This simple change, designed to force myself to slow down, immediately brought additional benefits. I started noticing so much more during my walks – not just the fungi but also the light, colours and smells that surrounded me, all of which generated a much stronger connection with the environment I was in. Taking time to review and and choose just a few subjects to return to resulted in me spending more time with each one and being more creative and considered with my compositions. The whole experience became more pleasurable – I was spending less time on the computer and was buoyed by the fact that the images I was creating images that just felt more personal.

I plan to develop these ideas further this coming season now that I have had succesful surgery and will let you know how this goes.