How To Instantly Bring Focus To Your Photography

A tale of constraint and creativity

Hello fellow Substack creatives,

This week I’m sharing a simple tip to bring focus to your overall work or project.

I’m finding myself in a creative lull with my personal photography and thought exploring my previous themes and ideas would help to spark new ones. Naturally, I wanted to share this investigation with you and also highlight a simple way to find focus incase anyone needs a reminder.

This week’s Substack issue is brought to you by my friends in Finland at Kamerastore. If you are a film shooter you will likely know about the good work they do to repair and restore analog cameras. If you happen to be in the market for a new piece of gear (when aren’t we) then hit the button below to shop and receive a 10% discount on your purchase.

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Seeing Red has turned into a long term project...one that will never really come to an end

Constraint leads to creativity and that is a fact

This is not a new topic for me.

If you’ve followed me for some time now you will be well aware of my love for simplistic gear and compositions.

Ignoring a lot of factors is my creative super power and today I’m asking you to force yourself to narrow your vision and ignore everything but one element in order to bring focus to your work.

About 4 and half years ago now, I noticed that I gravitated towards red as a colour in my photographic work. I then started to do it more and more.

Just the act of noticing that I was heavily featuring red gave me focus.

Red then became more than a colour I favoured or enjoyed, but the central focus and subject of my work.

Seeing red nearly everywhere I went made it easy to build up a theme and project around this.

SEEING RED turned into how I see every day.

If i’m in doubt when shooting I look for red…and there it always is.

If I feel a client work image is lacking I bring in a red prop or a red garment to introduce some vibrancy.

Red is my ultimate crutch as a creative.

Just the same way red was my crutch as a lip colour choice from age 14 to 25.

Red. Always.

Red featuring in commercial work with the help of BROAD magazine.

These studies in red really came from choosing to impart constraint on my photographic process.

Putting rules and restrictions on what I was looking for gave me the boundaries I needed to find my style and voice as a photographer and I owe it all to the colour RED!

It’s so easy to go out with good intentions and an open mind, camera in hand only to come home with either nothing at all, or a selection that feels like 5 different people were pushing the shutter and none of it feels like YOU.

In order to get to the core of your style I think constraint is of the utmost importance.

The best thing about it is it’s free and simple to do.

You can just choose something and decide to soley seek it out and capture it until it doesn’t feel exciting to you anymore.

Four years on and red is still exciting to me. I’m hyper fixated on it and when something isn’t red I wish it was.

For you this hyper fixation could be

• Traffic cones

• Shopping trolleys

• Any one colour

• Umbrellas

• Lamps

• Doors

• The back of people

• Wires or pipes

• Abandoned buildings

Different red things to inspire you

The list goes on and it can really be anything. Don’t feel like it has to be something new or never been done before, because what will happen over time is you will have this extremely nuanced collection of one thing you’re focusing on and that’s what will make it special.

I used to have a rule that if I saw a Brian Eno record I didn’t own I had to buy it but then I couldn’t pay my rent one month and realised this was maybe not a finically responsible rule to have set for myself. I did end up with a nice little collection though.

The whole point of today’s letter is to extend an invitation to you to join the party of constraints and see it’s impact on your work.

If you are feeling any bit at all stale, lost or lacking with your creative output set yourself some boundaries right now!

I will only shoot…..

I can only use……

I must only do……

Just give yourself some hard and fast rules that will allow you to narrow the vision, cut out the noise and find your focus.

It’s the same with anything in life. If you try and do too many things you do nothing well.

If you try and be everything you will be nothing.

If you are too busy looking at what everyone else is doing you will lose sight of your own vision.

Pick some guns and stick to them and then see how it changes things dramatically for you.

Obviously I’m super intense and really all you need to do is decide to just shoot dogs you see walking past or vintage signs and it can be a casual constraint that slowly builds a project up over time.

I just found that once I committed to red I felt so crystal clear about what I wanted to convey as an artist both personally and professionally and I hope this simple exercise can yield the same result for you too.

If you are looking for more helpful tips on photography and how to approach it in a fresh way check out my video below on how I break down scenes and get many photos out of them.

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