How to Find & Follow Your Passion as a Photographer

This is going to be one of the most important post I’ve ever written. It the most important because of the topic: how to find and follow your passion as a photographer.

Let’s start off with this word passion. Oxford defines passion as:

  1. A strong and barely controllable emotion
  2. An intense desire or enthusiasm for something.

So when you put these two together as a photographer, you’ve got a strong emotion to capture what you have envisioned. You’ve got to go out and do something about it.

Now, what is your passion? Where is it? There’s some clues that different artists have left us. Pablo Picasso said,

“The purpose of art is washing the dust off of daily life, off our souls.”

Every day we get dust on our souls. Maybe more than just dust. That’s the purpose of art is to cleanse yourself of all that. That’s the core of this whole passion.

A photo from my trip to Mexico where I learned about my photography passion.

My Great Escape

I’m going to tell you this story I wrote in my book Create (you can read more about it here). I attended three high schools: I went to a great high school in Vermont my Junior year. For my senior year, I went back to California to this massive cinderblock school, and it reminded me of a prison. One of the problems with this school is they rehashed everything I had already learned from the other school. And at one point I decided I was going to drop out of high school and hit the road, like Jack Kerouac. 

Then I discovered that I had almost enough credits to graduate, all I needed was a social studies class. I found out I could go to Mexico for my last semester and work on a social project in the remote region of the Sierra Madre Mountains. After an amazing pitch to the principle, my plan was approved.

The most remarkable part of this is that I took a Rolex camera that my uncle had recently given me. I brought it with me to Mexico with dozens of rolls of black and white film. I documenting that trip was my passion. Our small group of five, together with locals, built a medical dispensary for that remote region. In between working I pulled out my camera and I kept photographing.

A photo from my trip to Mexico where I learned about my photography passion.

Lessons I Learned

Here are some of the lessons I learned.

  1. My protests and urge to flee the misery of high school prison didn’t get me out. In fact, I was more trapped and cut off than ever.
  2. Life began to dawn only when I stopped trying to escape and began to research and really look at my options.
  3. Tapping into the purpose to help others is what finally opened all the doors; even the principal couldn’t say no.
  4. I learned I had to work much, much harder for this taste of freedom. In high school, I was loafing along, 90% asleep. In Mexico we were building. We were working from dawn to dusk, cutting trees, making adobe lifting, tearing, sawing. But this hard work made me strong mentally, physically and spiritually.
  5. I was rewarded immensely by capturing some of my best photographic work and finding a new level of creativity.
  6. And finally, I learned that problems were solvable, not by running away from them but by looking for a real solution. Only then was I ever able to realize that after I decided to work on a higher purpose to help the people in this remote region in Mexico.

I learned deep life-long lessons from this experience. Here are some of the images I captured.

How to Find Your Passion

How can you find your own passion? Here’s what you can do now to find your own passion and get started.

  1. Look at work that really inspires you. I had a Henri Cartier-Bresson book that my dad gave me. I already had an idea of what kind of street photography resonated for me. Take notes about what it is that inspires you about the work. 
  2. Look for your strong and barely controllable emotion. Edward Weston defined Composition as “the strongest way of seeing.” How can you portray whatever it is you see in front of you in the strongest way possible? And how can you tap into that emotion?
  3. Visualize your story, feel it, breathe it, live it!
  4. Then you go out and capture it.  Capture it and you stay on it. I don’t care if you have to squeeze out a little bits of time here and there. That’s fine.
  5. Look at your images and compare them to the previous steps. How does it compare with what inspired you? Are you really getting those strong emotions into these images? Is it what you visualize?
  6. Go out and do it again.

Finally, post your images on AYP Club and Instagram. Tell us your story. Tag me because I want to see your images. I want to hear what you are doing with this and join you on your journey.

Watch the live stream based on this blog here.

Be sure to keep an eye on our blog as we will be talking a lot more on this topic and what you can do to find and follow your passion.