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I'm afraid your work just isn't really what we're looking for, Mr.
Holden. Now, if you'll excuse me.
Oh.
Is there anything I can improve so I can maybe try and bring you
something better next time? I I suppose there is.
How about another 10,000 hours of Practise?
Oh, that's that's not very specific or or helpful.
Ha.
Let me demonstrate for you.
This image is art. Okay.
This image is wrong.
So you're saying is it because this image is old and this image is
not? Mr.
Holden, I suggest you leave. When we are brought up through school,
we're used to having teachers or our parents tell us when something is correct
or good versus wrong or bad. And for many of us, that actually
continues past education and into our workplace, where we're relying on those
who are employed above us to be able to tell us whether or not
our work is like two spec or good enough for the company.
From our education into the workplace, we're used to having a hierarchy of
power structure so that we know whether or not we are approved by someone
above us. This definitely has benefits if you're
trying to improve your work to a precise technical level.
But in terms of being experimental and creative, this doesn't really help us.
The best artists that I've ever known personally, whether they're painters,
designers, filmmakers, they are the ones that don't pay attention to what anyone
else is doing. Yes, they ingest a lot of culture,
they watch a lot of films, they listen to a lot of music.
But ultimately, those are the people that do not care about what they're supposed
to do and instead just create what they think they want to see.
This ability, if you can do it, to disconnect your creativity from your
perceived value, is ultimately what can set you free and allow you to
pursue the ideas that are really true to who you are versus what you
think the market or a gatekeeper or a higher power might expect from you.
Before we go any further with this video, I want you to understand that
the fact that you want to create something to share with the world is
already something to celebrate, regardless of it being given any value by
a higher power. Something I learned through therapy in the
last couple of years has been that just because you enjoy something, like,
for me, making YouTube videos or Practising street photography or just
camera gear in general, just because you enjoy something, that is enough reason for
you to do it. I was always looking for some sort
of deeper, profound value that I had to deliver to the world through any
project that I did. And it stopped me from doing anything,
and it stopped me from enjoying anything because I wanted to find this higher
purpose. But ultimately, the fact that you enjoy
it as a person in your short time on this planet is enough reason
for you to pursue something. There's no need for approval from a
higher power or from a boss or from a teacher.
Just doing this for me is enough. And the small community we've got going
on through comments, through Discord, through Instagram so far, it's like, okay,
cool. I have a nice online community of
people who are into the same stuff I'm into, and that's just an added
bonus. And we don't need permission from any
higher power or gatekeeper to keep that. But sometimes you do need to ask
them for something. Before I go, mr.
Curator, do you mind if I just use your WiFi?
Yes, I suppose. We use the Gallery Cafe WiFi next
door.
It's free.
Oh, this WiFi network doesn't look very secure.
Are you using NordVPN VPN? Are they like NWA?
I don't listen to hip hop. No, NordVPN is a virtual private network.
If you jump onto any public WiFi like this cafe network, your data could
be intercepted by malicious third parties who are setting up fake networks to
give you Internet access in exchange for your data.
You mean they can see my browsing history?
Yes, and they can see your password entries, your payment methods, and they
can also change some of your sensitive data.
I have to remove all of my browsing history immediately?
Or you could just try NordVPN. It's the simple and affordable way to
encrypt your traffic and protect your data across all devices.
Plus, it blocks trackers and protects you from malware.
Okay, where do I get it?
You can get it here@nordvpn.com, Georgevpn.
And it's totally risk free, and you get a 30 day money back guarantee.
Not only does it protect your data, but if you choose a different location
in the NordVPN app, you can access content that's regionally locked.
This means getting different content on streaming sites from other countries or
getting your local content when you're abroad just by using the app.
I'm already logged in.
This is fantastic.
I was so worried for a moment.
There is an obvious difference, though, isn't there?
These images aren't just two images, both shot, I think, 28 mil on this
one as well, on black and white film, there's a lot more happening here.
While this one might have more subjects and more faces.
For example, here we have many more shapes and we have motion blur, whereas
here we have frozen action. There are many, many things you can
say about these images, and this is not an art theory video.
But regardless of the medium being the same, for some reason, this image from
the past just stands out significantly more being alive today.
In the 2020s, when we look back at photos from, like, the,
there's so much for us to latch onto because it feels kind of foreign,
but also weirdly familiar at the same time.
We get to imagine what life was like back then, and we get to
kind of envy the photographers that got to shoot on streets in that era.
And it helps us fill in all those images from stories that our
grandparents might have told us to be able to see what day to day
life looked like fifty s sixty years ago.
Especially when we look back at street photography from that era.
I don't know about you, but I tend to find almost every image I
see from the 50s or 60s or seventy s I tend to hold all
of them in such a high regard. And whether or not that's because they've
managed to stand the test of time or it's just that we look back
at the past through rose tinted glasses. I have a few thoughts on why
this is, but if you have any of your own, please drop them in
the comments. There's partially that difference in
fashion. The cars you see on the streets,
or sometimes even the architecture or the sort of shops that are around at
that time that just make looking back at these decades like, magical.
And to me, there's also a very important difference in the context or the
venue that we tend to see these older images compared to where we
typically see most contemporary images on our phones.
Whenever we look at older images, they might be in something like a photography
book, or they might be in an art gallery, or they might just be
a handful of prints on someone's wall. But when we see these images from
the past in a larger scale, in a more physical, tangible form, I think
we tend to award it with more heft.
We tend to think this is a more important image.
It has been printed, it's been held onto, it's been shared.
When we look at the photos we take on a day to day shoot
today, would these photos look better in ten to 20 years once they have
the ability to be looked back on? Or do they stand out enough on
their own right now? Sometimes the photos you first bring home
from your SD card or from your roll of film, the ones that first
stand out are the ones with a very obviously interesting composition, or
the ones with hard light that create geometric shapes.
But are these the ones that just immediately catch your eye with something
bold and different? Or are these the ones that in
2030 years time you're going to look back on and go, wow, I can't
believe I took that photo back then. When you compare these to maybe the
more everyday images of a crowd of people, or one person in a crowd,
that maybe the composition isn't anything special, but maybe it's those images that
when we look back in the future, we can see, we encapsulated a moment
in time. Perhaps there was a trend in fashion
at the time, or a trend in technology, or trend in human behaviour.
We've been through so many changes just in the last five years of masks,
no masks, selfies selfie sticks, all sorts of stuff.
Are we going to be able to look back in the future at a
time when all these images we think are boring and amateur today might be
the ones that really stand out in a few decades time?
Probably the hardest pill that any of us have to swallow is that we
don't shoot enough. I don't want to admit this, but
I definitely don't shoot enough. There's people who shoot far less than
I do, there's people who shoot significantly more than I do.
And a lot of the time, for each of us individually, whatever standard
we're currently shooting at in terms of frequency, it's still not enough.
Years ago, I think I would have told most people when discussing
creativity that I am a perfectionist. And a lot of the time that
was an excuse for not getting something finished.
I just was like, oh, I need it to be perfect.
If I can't do it right, I'm not going to do it at all.
And it would just lead to me having equipment that I didn't use, having
ideas that I never acted on, and ultimately feeling quite low creatively.
And then a few years ago, long after I started this channel, long after
I started freelancing and creating work more consistently, I actually started
saying, you know what, I'm a completionist.
I don't really care if something is an eight out of ten for me,
I'd rather complete more eight out of ten quality projects versus sitting on a
ten out of ten project but too scared to share it in case it's
not perfect. If you believe at the moment you
think you're a perfectionist, or you're worried you might be a perfectionist, I
have a very simple completionist trick for you, and that is going to be
starting a very small project, a micro project, if you will.
And this just involves defining a very clear finish line on when a project
will be finished. Rather than archiving and agonising over
every image you shoot, just for a period of time, instead, go out with
a very particular focus into something you want to capture.
With every outing, shooting, street photography, you will ultimately gather
more images that you can put into this one focus project in your local
area that once you have enough images that you think tell enough of a
story, then you have something you can share with the world and you can
feel that sense of accomplishment. In a couple of past videos, I've
shared some details of my project that I've started recently on shooting dogs
around a certain part of Manchester with their owners.
If you want to see the first video I talked about this project in
that is here, but also I'll replace this with a new video that's coming
out next week that updates how this is going and how I approach my
subjects.