Hi all,
We made it. 🎉 End of the year, and it inevitably brings darker days, longer nights, and a notable lack of energy for creative pursuits — or anything at all, really. So in this final post of 2022, I’ll share some images I’ve made through the last few winters, and how the meaning of motivation can change throughout the down season.
Embrace the Slower Pace
I can only speak for myself, but I know that when I try to fight against something, my energy reserves are burned through way quicker than I expected. What I set out to do will get done, but the results aren’t great, and that can lead to weeks of demotivation when my goal was the opposite — like life just played a reverse ‘Uno’ card on me.
If you’re the same way, here’s your permission to not make or do much over the winter season. Be easy on yourself. It’s a great time to reflect on what you’ve done throughout the year, and find renewed joy in what you’ve accomplished, instead of always trying to top it. In a photography context, it might be the right time for you to re-organise your files, catalog your work, maybe finally submit it to all those publications you bookmarked throughout the year.
While it’s quiet, be quiet. Capture the things around you that bring you pleasure - family, friends, food, peace. It’s perfectly fine to take some truly mundane photos and forget about them for a dozen years — not everything needs constant display, and we can enjoy the process without the result.
Some old work, like the photos below, will never be what I consider to be my ‘best’ output, but I am so glad I captured them. I instantly remember winter in Montreal, the bare sky, the salty pavement, and hopping from cafe to cafe just to keep warm.
Bring Your Camera Places You Wouldn’t
If the outside sucks, bring your camera inside. That’s big-brained advice you won’t find anywhere else.
Bring a camera to the mall, to the museum (regardless of how allowed it might be), bring it to the pub. You could end up with absolutely nothing, but you’ll have tried, and in the winter that’s often what counts the most. There’s often a whole lot of opportunity in indoor spaces that we’ve missed in other contexts. Lights look and feel differently in darker conditions than they might in the summer, and where there once might’ve been people in t-shirts, they’re now in interesting puffy or textured jackets.
That Monochrome Life
The grey-ness of winter is maybe the hardest part — an endless parade of monotony, a 50’s TV world devoid of spice or flavour, constantly flat. I have no positive spin. A lot of photographers I know switch almost exclusively to black and white in the winter.
There’s a two-tiered approach to this. First of all, black and white film tends to have a wider available ISO range to expand into (so if your film is rated at 400 ISO, you can often safely push it into the 1600 ISO range, trading more grain for more light sensitivity). This just means you can keep shooting past 4pm after the sun fades (fuck).
The second reason is that when everything is grey, there’s not much reason to work against it. If you don’t normally shoot monochrome, it’s a great chance to embrace it, knowing that you’re not missing much with the lack of colour. Personally, that ‘timeless’ quality of Black and White really shines through during the winter months. When I look back, I don’t remember the biting winds or the numb hands, but I do remember the little moments that warmed me up from the inside and made me look forward to what was coming next.
Take care of yourself, treat those around you well, and have a whole lot of chocolate or whatever over the holidays!