Getting Out of the Rut

Getting Out of the Rut – Since getting into photography nearly eight years ago, I’ve been learning, training, and teaching myself the art whenever I could, but sometime last year, I realized I had kind of stopped pushing myself. I was still out shooting a lot, both for fun and for paid gigs, but creatively, I was repeatedly going through the same processes over and over and felt I wasn’t growing with the work.

At the end of last year, I stumbled across a photography course by a really well-known photographer and for some reason, I didn’t hesitate to pull out my wallet. Not only did I buy the first course, but I grabbed all three for nearly 35 hours classes. After starting the first lesson of the first class, I was just addicted. My mind was blown by the information I was being shown. And it wasn’t the act of taking the photo that pulled me in – I’m proud to say I had a lot of that down; It was the post processing techniques in Photoshop that I was either just oblivious to or that I had just ignored in the past because I had been content in my old ways.

I quickly realized that it was the next step that I needed to push my creativity and get out of that rut I had felt.

A trip to Seattle in March was kind of my first big test of some of the new tools I had been learning. This image was shot from the Sky View Observatory on the 73rd floor of the Columbia Center and is a blend of 4 different shots taken over the course of an hour and a half.

That first course turned out to essentially be my gateway drug because the next thing I knew, and much to my girlfriend’s dismay, I had ripped through over 90 hours of tutorials in the span of two months. I then spent the rest of my free time this winter practicing the new techniques through some personal projects, reworking some older images that needed more help, and then revamping my entire workflow. It’s all been much more time-consuming than I ever expected or intended going in. 

On top of that, this whole thing make me realize that I wanted to focus on more architecture, design, high-end real estate, and luxury hotels & resorts – all things I do love to shoot, but I’ve always photographed in more of a passive way. So on top of revamping my entire system and workflow and doing my normal landscape/travel photography thing for One for the Road, I’ve also been working for the past 6 months to now get Brendan Caffrey Photography off the ground to pursue those other subjects more. Brendan Caffrey Photography is definitely still a work in progress so let me know if you have some feedback, but at least I’m up-and-running! 

So that’s why I disappeared for more than half a year.

Oh yeah… and after a couple trips to Utah and one to Seattle, I went to Hong Kong, Singapore, and Bali for a while. I have some new pictures up, but there’s a lot more to come!

Hong Kong from Victoria Peak