6 things that make me a better photographer that have nothing to do with photography

If you've been creating long enough, you've probably hit that wall where everything you're making starts to feel like a slightly worse version of something you've already made.

It's not burnout exactly. It's more like creative staleness, and the frustrating thing is that trying harder inside your own medium usually doesn't fix it. More shooting, more editing, more scrolling for inspiration, none of it really moves the needle.

What actually moves the needle, at least for me, almost never has anything to do with photography.

1. Staring at a tree. Or a window. Or literally anything that isn't a screen.

Said tree ⬆️

I have a hammock in my yard underneath a really big tree, and when it's warm out, I will go lie in it and just look up. No podcast running in the background, no phone in my hand. Just me and the tree, which I realize sounds a little only child of me (I am an only child, btw) but I genuinely think it's one of the more valuable things I do for my creativity.

Here's my thing with the phone (and I say this as someone who uses it constantly and is not about to go live off the grid), it's a closed loop. A total echo chamber. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you already responded to, which means you are never genuinely surprised by anything. Your brain feels busy but it's not actually generating anything new.

What we've essentially done is eliminate boredom from our lives entirely, and boredom, it turns out, is where a lot of original thought actually comes from.

The hammock is where I get my real ideas. Sometimes it's a window. Sometimes it's just sitting somewhere without immediately reaching for my phone. Wherever you can point your eyes at something that doesn't need anything from you, that's the move.

2. Physical print and art.

🥹

There is something that happens when you look at imagery that exists as a physical object rather than a pixel on a screen, and I don't think we talk about it enough. Go to your local library and spend some time with the coffee table books. Go to a museum and stand in front of something. Let yourself look at it without being able to scroll past it.

Everything on our feeds eventually starts to look the same because it's all being optimized for the same formats, the same ratios, the same platform behavior.

Print just doesn't do that, it's the thing itself, with no algorithm involved. Perspective really is everything, and sometimes you have to physically move your body somewhere different to find a new one.

3. A hobby you are genuinely bad at.

I make drawings. Two-dimensional, chaotic drawings, and they are not good. I want to be clear that this is not false modesty, there is no hidden talent quietly revealing itself over time. They just look really bad, and I keep doing it anyway.

And honestly it might be one of the most useful creative practices I have, because when you're a professional at something, everything you make carries this weight of whether it's working or not.

A hobby you're bad at strips all of that away completely. You're just playing with color, with medium, with no stakes whatsoever and that energy has a way of feeding back into your actual work even when you can't directly trace the connection.

The worse you are at it, the more freeing it tends to be.

4. Gaming.

When creativity dips, I do be on my farm 😤

Stardew Valley specifically, but this applies more broadly to any game that puts you in a creative problem-solving mode. You're constantly making decisions, managing how different elements relate to each other, figuring out systems and even though none of it maps directly onto real life, it genuinely shifts how your brain approaches problems.

You start seeing things in terms of how they interact, what's missing, what could work differently. Also, it's just fun, and I think we underestimate fun as a creative input.

5. Watching day-in-the-life YouTube.

This one sounds passive but it's actually one of the more quietly perspective-shifting things on this list.

We get so locked into our own routines; same morning, same habits, same loop on repeat. We forget we're allowed to just do things differently. Watching someone else move through their ordinary day, even a random blogger or artist you've never heard of, does something to your brain. It's like being reminded that life can be arranged in other configurations, and that you don't have to blow your whole routine up to feel it. Sometimes just switching one small thing around is enough to shake something loose that felt stuck.

Other people's ordinary days are surprisingly good creative fuel.

6. Taking real breaks from shooting and when you do shoot, shooting for no one.

Me and my girl Ashleigh creating cyanotypes :)

Athletes talk about this all the time, stepping away from a sport for a while and coming back feeling genuinely reinvigorated in a way that just grinding through never produces.

Turns out it works the same way creatively. Breaks are not the enemy of output, rather they're often what makes good output possible in the first place.

And in the same vein: not every photo you take has to be public, or part of a body of work you're building toward something with. Shooting just to shoot, for yourself, with no audience in mind, is a completely different experience than shooting with a purpose.

Sometimes it's the thing that reminds you why you started doing this in the first place.

All this to say…

The common thread through all of it is that creativity needs input from outside itself. It needs you to actually be living and noticing and playing and getting bored and doing things badly before it has anything new to work with. The echo chamber of your own medium, however much you love it, will only take you so far.

These little things add up. I promise they do.

With love, Olivia 🖤