If you need a small dose of inspiration to shoot more and immerse yourself in your photography, check out this short video from respected travel photographer Mitchell Kanashkevich. For Kanashkevich, living for the story has meant shaping his life around photography, and he draws on this experience to help you discover creativity and authenticity through your work.
Watching Kanashkevich’s video immediately reminded me of a few words from David Alan Harvey which I mentioned to photographer Steve Brazill in this podcast a few months ago. I’m not usually one for inspirational quotes but I stumbled on this early on in my photographic career and it's stuck with me ever since. I can't find the original interview with Alan Harvey but I promised Brazill that I’d dig it out from my notes:
It’s easy to be a critic and it’s easy to be a philosopher, but it’s much harder to be the guy who actually goes out there and does it. In every pub there’s a genius drinking a beer with all these great ideas and poetry in his head. But the really creative people have these great ideas and can actually nail the board to the wall, too.
The emphasis is a little different to the message being conveyed by Kanashkevich but for me, it’s a reminder that no-one shoots great photos by sitting at home and talking about them. It also ties in nicely with a few words from one of my favorite photography-based, inspirational short films, Dark Side of the Lens: “If I only scrape a living, at least it’s a living worth scraping.” Perhaps that’s worth an article all of its own.
Feeling inspired? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Thank you for the story and the quote, Andy.
For me “Living for a (good) story” means to be acutely aware of your own environment, which is inheritedly difficult, since we are programmed for a habituation to preserve our energy. Breaking habituation is not easy, well most of the time at least. There is no universal recipe and the process could be as painful as the creative boredom itself. All in all its all deeply personal how to choose the right way to break away of your own routines...
I’ve got to stop since I run out of my beer.
He is absolutely amazing and I hope he will become more famous on youtube and insta...