Motivation can be difficult to find sometimes. On certain days I go out and the conditions aren’t ideal, and if I’m shooting work on spec I find myself leaving my camera in the bag and not shooting much. While I don’t think there is anything wrong with this, I’ve wanted to try and add some motivation to my shooting to make myself more engage and find the story in each day out. After something I recently heard I’ve been challenging myself to create a simple story before I even head out shooting to give myself a direction to shoot towards.

My practice has been to write this down in the notes on my phone before even getting to the location. This way I can reference the story idea in my mind and challenge myself to get images that I might not have originally captured to help communicate the story.

For this day I wrote down, “A Whistler man takes a morning paddleboard on the lake before heading into work.” It’s simple, but gives a direction, and makes me think about what images I want to capture to communicate this story.