From scrolling to creating: on photography as a creative outlet
How I find a balance between consuming content and creating. This post deals with finding a balance between never ending feeds and activities that allow creative creation
We are all guilty of it: we reach for our phone first thing in the morning and find a stream of notifications competing for our attention. With a mix of curiosity and reluctance, we open one of them, only to be sucked into an infinite virtual world. Throughout the day, we continue to consume content of all kinds: texts, photos, videos, music, podcasts.
I’ve been there. I call this the input: the never ending stream of content personally curated to you by algorithms. On some days, the input is happening every minute of the day: the podcast during the morning shower, the short form video eating up any 10 minute break, the long form video for longer breaks, the facebook feed showing you the most random stuff…
Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet. I also appreciate a lot of the content I consume. I can laugh out loud looking at my phone and be awed by the creativity people display online.
But I also need time when I limit the input and focus on the output. The output is the time spent thinking about things and creating. There is no influx of new information. It’s about finding a balance between being on the receiving end of ideas and messages and taking time to distill those and coming up with your own.
The output can come in any shape or form. For me, it’s often photography, writing, and daydreaming.
Photo walks
The photos in this post were all taken on the same day of shooting last month. Taking a casual walk on a Sunday morning to do street photography is a refreshing escape from my midweek activities that mainly take place behind a screen. It challenges my creativity as I look for new things to photograph, actively observe my surroundings. It allows me to switch from input mode to output mode.
A lot of times, the start is a bit rough. My first photos of the day are often bad but they are a necessary bridge to the better ones. With a bit of patience, I start to see beauty in the mundane and scenes that I find interesting.
It encourages me to slow down and take my time, to think about composition, light, and human elements within the frame.
