Where do we go from wherever here is?

This is about questions. Those you get asked, but more importantly, those you ask yourself. The ones you ask yourself might be the same you get asked as when you are confronted with some questions you might find you don’t have an answer or at least not one that is good enough. More questions will arise once you have started this whole business of being aware of who you are, what you are, what you do and why and how you do it.

You might ask yourself why even bother and that would be the one question you’d need to answer, but those questions and the thinking about them in order to find some satisfying answer might be the best thing you can do for your photography.

There is for instance the question of what you do. Whether someone is trying to start a conversation at a cocktail party or it is you asking yourself what the hell it is you are doing. The first might be satisfied with “I am a photographer”, if not you’ll have to specify commercial, landscape, fashion or whatever it is you do. But is that good enough as an answer for yourself?

I always found it a bit strange to describe “in a sentence or less” what it is I am doing. And “photographer” really doesn’t cut it for me. I write. I play music. I think (way too much). There is so much more to it. I don’t think there is a single word or a short sequence of words that can say it all. I also won’t take the easy way out and call myself an “artist”. That word doesn’t mean anything to me, so I can’t use it.

My friend Toni Lovejoy once called me a “natural poet”. Merriam-Webster defines a poet also as “one (such as a creative artist) of great imaginative and expressive capabilities and special sensitivity to the medium”. With that I can live.

This is just one example of the kind of questions that will help you in your photography and also in your life as I think these are connected and what I think, feel and do as a human being will also find its way into my photographs.

What is important if you want to evolve as a human being and a natural poet, picturemaker, dancer, writer, musician, painter, photographer, ………. (your word here), is a sense of direction.

It is really crucial to try to find a sense of direction in life. I’ve been often walking in the Himalayas for many days and it is not always fun, (…) but if you have a sense of direction, every step is a kind of joy in the form of effort.  But if suddenly I get lost, (…) the despair and exhaustion sets in. Why should I walk a few steps more? I am not even sure if they are taking me nearer or further away from my goal.

Matthieu Ricard “The Skill Of Happiness”

To determine a direction, a general direction at least, you need to know where you are and where you want to go. Whether you then move along a straight line to get to your destination or a winding road, does not matter. Whether your path is straight or winding might say something about you, but it does not really matter if you don’t want it to. Also, the destination might change once you get started, you might redefine your goal once, twice or dozens of times along the way. As long as you stay on course and make sure you always have an idea about where you are, you can’t go wrong.

In ultrarunning we had a saying that I think very much applies to photography or any creative work:

90% is mental, the rest is in your head.

To find out where you are, I think you need to be able to look at what you do “not critically, or with self-deprecation or any sense of inferiority” and see what you really like and what not. What you would want to see in there which is missing right now. How you do things and why you do them like that. Whether there is a reason to keep doing it like that or whether something could be changed about it that would make the process feel more like “you”.

Once you start these questions, there is a chance you might see more things in everyday life, in books, in conversations, in paintings, in music, in any kind of stimulation, that can start another train of thought, that has some ties to photography.

So once you have found where you are and where you need to be, once you have that direction, you can make an informed choice about which workshop you want to book, which camera to buy, which software skill to learn and you realize that those are only tools. The important bit – finding out which thoughts and feelings are the basis for your personal creative work – has already been done.

Knowing this, you’ll find yourself to be more confident about what you are doing and to be really in charge of where the journey is going. And so you can see me hiking through the fields or taking the bus downtown and I am as hard at work on expressing myself creatively even without a camera, a guitar, a notebook, but using the one tool that is so uniquely me. My self.

If you are interested in discussing these kind of things in more depth, follow me on instagram @holgermischke or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/holgermischkephotography) to learn about my webinar towards the end of the year.