creating

DSLRguide has been one of my favorite channels since I started messing around in YouTube. Back to front, you can really see the progression of his work as he’s continued to put content out there. He shoots a lot of his material with an entry level Canon T3i, and still comes away with some beautifully constructed and graded videos.

It’s not just the visual element I’m into, though. Most of his videos take an almost blog-like format, not a vlog as people know vlogs to be today, but more of an essay-like style, where he starts with an idea and tailors the entire video to explain it. The material ranges anywhere from How To Edit Videos (for Beginners) to not as simple as ‘follow your dreams’, and the variance is great – it means that I can keep coming back to this channel whether I want to pick up some new tricks or not. But he posted a great video recently on the struggle of inspiration and how artists constructively use discontentment to reach the gem in the rough. I’ve gone ahead and shared it above so you guys can give it a watch yourself if you like.

I feel as though artists and people living and working in creative circles definitely do have this funny relationship with discontentment. I think it’s important to step back from your work once in a while, take a look at what you’ve finished, and be happy with what you created. This end product – this poem, this video, this picture, this story – that’s you, condensed into a form outside yourself, rife with the emotion you carried through the process of creating, and here for posterity now. You made this. Be proud. But at the same time, that voice inside that demands that we express ourselves somehow almost necessitates that we not stay too long in that state of contentment – that we need to get out there and start making our next big thing. That we tear down our monuments and build something finer. That we shred stories because we can do it better this time.

It’s this beautiful vicious circle that leads you to better things if you choose to ride those waves instead of getting washed along with the tide.

So yeah. Do it.

I don’t go out to snap photos nearly as much as I used to. But then again, that’s actually pretty normal for me. I go through these constant cycles of taking a bunch of photos, then taking a long break, then taking more, and then disappearing again…it’s a miracle that I’ve managed to stay afloat above 100 followers on Instagram for as long as I have. Really.

I blame Pokemon Go. It’s hard to take world-shattering pictures and catch dank ‘mons at the same time.

But despite how long the break, I always grapple with one thing in particular while I’m out taking shots, and that’s redundancy. The notion that I’ve been to a particular spot already, and any end product I can shape from that repetition is very much just a rehash of what I’ve already formed from that spot before.

For me, with certain spots, there are only so many times you can revisit a spot before you start thinking that you’ve already taken more than you can ask out of it. The seasons change, the lighting shifts by the hour, the people in frame change faces, change names, but the feeling is realized, and there’s only so many times you can ask to borrow that from a particular place before the song turns into a low drone, and the message is lost in the familiarity of a scene seen too many times before.

So you move to the next thing, and the cycle repeats.

But therein lies the beauty of being someone who creates, and being someone who sticks with their brand of art long enough to see the images start to sharpen, the notes start to ring, the words start to sing. You come back to that place after being to so many other places, when the message isn’t as clear as they days you visited day after day, back to back. You’re a bit older now, a bit different, a bit more ready to look at it some other way.

And you do it all again.

Go back to that old spot. Find that forgotten draft. Pick that half-done song up from the chorus. Find the new in the old.

It’s surprising the kind of inspiration you’ll find in the things you’ve already done.

FernwayPress

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