Make Sh*tty Photos Again

Maybe getting better starts with caring a little less about being good.

I think I’ve become pretty good at knowing what a good photograph is supposed to look like… And I’m starting to wonder if that’s part of the problem.

After enough years behind a camera, you develop instincts. You know what light works. You know which compositions feel balanced. You know when something probably isn’t worth pressing the shutter for. You start recognizing the photograph before you even make it.

That sounds like growth. And technically, it is.

But somewhere along the way, experience can turn into expectation. And expectation can quietly kill curiosity.

When I first started photographing things, I didn’t know enough to be afraid of making a bad photograph. I just took pictures. Everything felt worth photographing. A weird shadow on a wall. A friend sitting across the table. Cars in a parking lot. Neon signs. The ocean. Some random building I thought looked cool.

There wasn’t a strategy. There wasn’t a portfolio. There wasn’t an audience. There was just curiosity.

“What happens if I photograph this?”

That question used to be enough. I miss that.

The longer you create, the easier it becomes to develop an internal editor. Before the camera ever reaches your eye, that voice is already working.

“The light sucks.”

“The background is messy.”

“That’s not interesting enough.”

“Someone has already photographed this better.”

“This won’t fit my style.”

And suddenly you’re not exploring anymore. You’re curating.

That distinction has been sitting with me lately.

Because maybe creativity isn’t supposed to begin with knowing what’s worth keeping. Maybe it begins with being willing to find out.

Film has helped me rediscover some of this. Which is ironic. You’d think having 36 exposures would make me more precious about every frame. Sometimes it does.

But a 40 or 50 year old camera loaded with film can also have the opposite effect.

There’s no screen. No histogram. No instant judgment.

I take the photograph and move on. Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. I’ll find out later. There’s something incredibly freeing about that. The photograph gets to exist before I decide whether it deserves to. And I think I need more of that in my life right now.

More unfinished ideas. More notebooks filled with terrible sentences. More rolls of film with frames that make absolutely no sense. More photographs taken simply because something caught my attention for half a second. More experimenting without needing to turn the experiment into content. More creating things that never get posted.

Because somewhere along the way, creativity became dangerously close to production.

Make something. Edit it. Package it. Post it. Measure it. Repeat.

That cycle can make you forget why making things felt good in the first place. Maybe that’s part of what creative slumps are trying to tell us.

I don’t need to become a better photographer right now. I need to become a more curious one.

Stop asking: “Is this good?”

And start asking: “What happens if…?”

What happens if I shoot this roll differently? What happens if I photograph something I normally ignore? What happens if I write something that doesn’t fit the blog? What happens if I leave the “wrong” lens on the camera? What happens if I make something purely because it makes me laugh? What happens if nobody ever sees it?

That feels exciting. In a world full of algorithms and metrics, that excitement can be hard to find.

Kids understand this instinctively.

Give a kid paper and a marker and they’ll start drawing. They don’t spend twenty minutes deciding what their artistic voice is. They don’t wonder whether the drawing matches their previous work. They definitely don’t worry about engagement. They make something because making something is fun. Then they make another thing.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we learn to become embarrassed with being bad at things. So we stop experimenting. We stick to what we know. We protect the identity we’ve built. And slowly, without realizing it, we trade discovery for consistency.

But every creative breakthrough starts with doing something you don’t completely understand yet.

That’s the deal. You have to be bad before you can be different. You have to make photographs that miss. You have to write sentences you eventually delete. You have to chase ideas that lead absolutely nowhere.

Because sometimes the dead end has another road hiding inside it.

I’m trying to make peace with that again.

I want photography to feel a little unpredictable. I want rolls of film where I don’t remember half the frames. I want notebooks with crossed-out ideas and stupid observations. I want to follow things simply because they interest me. I want to create without immediately asking what the creation is for.

Maybe some of it will suck.

Actually… I hope some of it does.

Because if everything I’m making is safe enough to be good, I’m probably not wandering far enough away from what I already know.

So this is the assignment I’m giving myself:

Make shitty photographs again.

Shoot the weird light. Take the unnecessary frame. Follow the dumb idea. Carry the camera when there’s supposedly “nothing to photograph.” Write something that might never get published. Be a beginner at something.

Get curious.

Get lost.

Make a mess.

F*ck up.

Because maybe the goal isn’t to produce more great work. Maybe the goal is to create enough space for great work to eventually find me.

And maybe the quickest way back to creativity isn’t remembering how to be a professional.

Maybe it’s remembering what it felt like before I knew what the hell I was doing.

Stay curious.
— Brendan