Life has become incredibly complicated and stressful this year. Both personal and work life have taken some incredible hits in the last three months, and to be quite honest, if it wasn’t for having Sofia around to motivate me, I would probably have struggled to push through it. But pushing through it is exactly what I’m doing, and here’s how.
I’m simplifying my life in every single area to focus on what is actually needed. I find that when things get complicated, when I have pressure coming from all angles, the best thing that I can do is remove clutter, remove any additional need to have to think, and to simplify everything.
Financially, I’ve cut everything but the essentials. Gone are all my monthly subscriptions —I now have one, and that is the Adobe Photography plan. Gone is any non-essential expenditure, and after the warning signs of May’s traffic drop, I immediately started looking for a new house, a smaller, more affordable house. We move next week, just in the nick of time after September’s catastrophic traffic decline for my website.
While initially I was left scrambling to find a fix for the problems I was experiencing, a moment of clarity came over me: I’m not going to fight the system, I’m not going to complain, I’m not going to be angry. Instead, it’s forced me to re-focus on what inspires me, what motivates me, and what helps me to do what I love to do.
Part of that was culling the superfluous camera kit that had built up over the last 3-5 years, the majority of which has now been sold off to MPB. The second was to strip my photography back to basics with my Nikon Z system. I have a decent collection of Nikon Z glass still, but in the last two weeks, I’ve found myself gravitating back to my instincts to tell stories with my photography, to work on projects, and to not try to be all things to all men by trying to cover every type of photography.
I’m the kind of person that really enjoys taking photos of most subjects, whether it’s wildlife, landscapes, street photography, or people, but that core desire for my photos to form part of a larger narrative leads me back to my project work. And in re-focusing on those, I’ve also re-confirmed my preference for shooting primes.
Yes, zooms give a lot of flexibility to get different shots in one outing, but after heading out with my Z8 with the 35mm f/1.8S attached alongside the Z6III with the 50mm f/1.8S, that way of working—knowing the focal length, removing choice, and just having to work with what I have—forces me to really look at a scene, to move around it, to vary angles, to find a way of bringing the various elements together to form a coherent frame. I enjoy that way of working.
And I’ve come to realise that it immerses me in my subjects far more than simply being able to rotate the zoom ring to frame up a shot. The images I end up creating looking better, have a coherence between them that I simply don’t get when using zoom lenses, and I think for me, most importantly of all, this way of working truly immerses my brain to a point that I attain total focus.
I find this state almost meditative. For those moments when I’m working a scene, I’m no longer suffering the physical ache of missing Izzy, my youngest daughter. I’m no longer nervous in the pit of my stomach as to whether I can pay the bills in two months’ time, and I’m no longer thinking of the response I’d like to send to my wife but don’t when she gaslights me again. I’m just David, trying to take the best photo that I can of that scene in that moment.
I’ve taken to keeping my kit on me at most times, safely stashed on the backseat of the car during the school run with Sofia. Last week, I spotted a beautiful scene with local farmers harvesting potatoes in the morning light, a huge flock of birds in their wake picking up the scraps. It was stunning.
So after I dropped Sofia at school, I returned to that spot, parked up my car, and headed out: with my Z8 + 35mm, Z6III + 50mm, and Zf + 85mm fitted into the ThinkTank Retrospective 30—which is simply the best shoulder bag I could find to accommodate that three-camera, three-prime setup—slung over my shoulder, I wandered into the field.
I watched the tractors methodically harvest the potatoes and load them while moving into the containers, ready to be shipped off to market. They were further away from me than when I had initially passed them on the way to Sofia’s school, and now the huge flocks of birds had sadly gone. A telephoto zoom would in theory have been useful to gain the reach I needed, but instead, I wandered into the field and simply watched the vehicles as they moved further away.
I could see where they had harvested and knew they would head back towards me on their next run, so I moved around and checked compositions so that when the brief moment came, and they moved into shot, I would be able to get the shots I wanted.
One of the farmers’ vehicles, a Land Rover Defender, synonymous with the countryside, was parked near to where I was standing. I ended up using it as an element in the photo, which had I had a zoom lens attached, I likely never would have done. Due to the constraints of the primes I was using—their inability to reach close enough to purely focus on the tractors working the fields—I had to search for and use other elements in order to complete the frame, and I think as a result, produced a much more interesting photo than would have been the case had I simply attached a zoom lens and been able to focus purely on the working vehicles.
Not only did I have to work the scene, which kept my mind focused, but for those 10 minutes, I was completely at peace.
Since I’ve re-focused on simplicity, a simple life with just what I need and nothing else, since I’ve drawn a line as to how much abuse (and yes, I’ll finally call it out for what it has been) I’m willing to take from a partner, and focus on the things that I can control, there has appeared a small light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve started building out the website that I want to create with davidjfleet.com, this website has seen a slight upturn in traffic which may give me a lifeline and potential runway to be able to build on, and in one week’s time, my decision a few months ago to move house will reduce my outgoings to a significantly lower level. Combined, all those things, I hope, will free up my mind to actually focus on the good things in life.