Shooting what you love... or not?

Image copyright Ian Ho 2009

An issue that all photographers have to deal with is about how to stay constantly motivated and passionate about photography. We all get a bit jaded once in a while and lose our creative direction. And perhaps my answer to that is simply 'shoot what you love!'

If you love wildlife, birds, animals, then go out and shoot them! If you are like me and love beautiful landscapes, then go out there and just shoot them! The idea here is that by shooting what truly makes you happy, you will really enjoy your craft as it is something you can relate too.

But I also realised that this attitude of 'only shooting what you like' can be a dangerous one. Although specialising in a genre of photography and exploring it in-depth is good, I feel we should not do this at the expense of being versatile with different types of photography. In other words, breadth and depth is needed for us to experience fully what photography is. Although we are to shoot what we love, I feel that occasionally it is good to shoot what we do not quite like too. And the main reason for doing so is to improve ourselves to become more all-rounded photographers.

For me personally, I love landscape and nature. I HATE sports and to a lesser extent portraits/people photography. I spend most of my photography time on landscapes, BUT I also try hard to improve my sports photography and learn the ropes whenever opportunity comes.

Just sharing with you some of my thoughts... yes it is true to shoot what makes you happy, but once in a blue moon get in touch with what you dislike too :)