Over the last few months I haven't taken as many photos. My balance was rocked and my drive vanished. I've mourned its loss, worried about it coming back, shook my head in frustration when part of me has wanted to pick up a camera, but another stronger part of me has said no. But I've never pushed my creativity*. It usually makes things worse. My creativity is stubborn, its determined, its wilful and amazingly, its probably the only part of me that really knows what it wants to do in any moment even if what it wants isn't necessarily what I think I want.
After getting back from our Berwick holiday I dropped off my films and through various faults at my lab (long story) three rolls of film weren't scanned properly. Luckily after asking around on Twitter, my friend Adam (who I'm sure I've featured here before) took my films for me and scanned the negatives. I can not thank him enough for that.
However, as I mentioned in one of my last posts, I really over exposed most of my Zenit photos - to the point of where the negatives were more purple than anything. The concious, forgiving part of me was ready to let them go - I'm learning, its OK to make mistakes right? But despite all my efforts, my subconscious, my creativity wouldn't. It kept coming back to them, dragging me back to them.
And suddenly I felt it. That drive that once was always there. It was back, straining against me. That stubbornness aiming for a result rather than sitting back and waiting. Something was in those photos. Something my creativity wanted to see, something it knew was there... and suddenly, after months of waiting, worrying, and fretting, I was crying again, but not through frustration, but through relief.
Relief because I was searching again... searching for something.
The photos scattered through this post are the final (heavily) edited versions from Lindisfarne that I finally decided felt 'right'. They're not perfect but then neither am I, neither is my zenit b, and my photography has many more mistakes than I would care to admit... but a part of me didn't give up on these photos, a part of me didn't give up on myself... and that is probably what I really needed to find rather than a pretty photo.
*For lack of a better word for that drive feeling that makes people do what they love - muse is also good I guess.