No motivation at all? Now what?

The year starts grey and dull, and every time I have walked our dog Guus I take my shoes off so as not to bring too much mud inside. Drizzly is perhaps the right word. The year starts the way I feel: a little under the weather and not particularly motivated.

I tend to lose myself in photo books and YouTube videos when I feel like this. Looking for inspiration and new impulses, I watch clips for far too long and snap curtly at people while barely looking up from my photo books. I know it is all on me, because I could just as well have headed out and wandered a city for hours, armed with my trusty Fujifilm X100VI. Of course. And I would probably have felt a good deal clearer for it. Happily I am allowed out again soon, in my beloved Antwerp. I am looking forward to it.

What does cheer me up is the book The Last Resort by Martin Parr. Beach photos, but in a street photography style. I was given it for my fiftieth birthday last month. Recommended. I am also cheered by the workshop I have booked with my old teacher from the Fotovakschool. We are going to work with the on-camera flash and with interior photography. Out of my comfort zone for a bit, learning something else.

Last year I took part in the exhibition Your Nijmegen (now finished), with photos by new residents of Nijmegen, to whom I gave a three-part workshop as an introduction to photography. Their view of Nijmegen, with a Nijmegen photo of mine alongside, hung in three places in the city: the Stevenskerk, the Lindenberg and the library.

If you have no inspiration for once, or simply no appetite for it, then do go and look up something you have always wanted to learn. And get to work on it. Puzzling away and getting freshly frustrated because something does not work yet always spurs me enormously to head out again.

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