Staying inspired.

Keeping your enthusiasm alive in a busy life.

Dec 15, 2025

Does your photography inspire you in the way that it used to, or has it been relegated to something occasional? Do you miss the drive and passion you once had, and if so, how do you get it back?

There was a long period in my life where my photography was so important to me that any other task or job that got in the way irritated me. If I couldn’t do my work I soon got edgy. Gradually the daily tasks began to eat into my creative time, but I still wanted to do it. If I hadn’t done anything creatively satisfying for weeks it was frustrating, but I still had ideas, still jotted things down and made little diagrams.

I am now at an age when my school friends are retired (that will never happen for me) and I should have more time now that the kids have left home, but the opposite has happened. My wife is a successful painter (@debbiegeorgeartist on instagram), and between us we have three online shops. The admin time that these take has become the thing that steals my photography/printing time and the last two months have been the busiest. We have acquired two grandchildren this year and another is due this week. A visit from any of them takes a full day out of the planned schedule, which is very nice, but leaves less time for the other stuff. I now find that I haven’t made a print that I’m really excited about since the middle of August (four months!). Does any of this sound familiar? Has this happened to you? How do you revive your enthusiasm? How do you get fired up again?

How do you keep the momentum going? How do you keep your enthusiasm alive with the distractions of the everyday? I think that experimentation and play are really useful here, because they take away any self imposed pressure to produce something worthwhile. I know that I can get stuck at times because I haven’t made a print that I am really excited about for a while. I then waste time chasing that elusive magic instead of letting it happen. Some people call it ‘getting out of your own way’, or disengaging the conscious part of your brain. Whatever you call it, you must not put yourself under any pressure. For the experience to generate the desire to repeat it, it must be enjoyable. Therefore fun must be the overriding reason for doing it. What aspect of it was fun before? For me, that was trying out a new type of camera, or an unusual film stock. Sometimes it was a film developer that I hadn’t tried before, or a new darkroom paper.

I already know from experience that experimentation and play are critical to my work, because that’s the way I have worked for decades. The only problem is, that experimentation takes time and doesn’t always produce great results. When I am pushed for time I have to decide whether I am going to use the couple of hours I have to catch up with my film processing, make contact sheets from the last session, make a print from my many negative files, or play around with something new.

Do you find Youtube tutorials inspiring, or annoying? For myself it’s mostly the latter, but if they get you inspired to try something then that is great. Personally I would rather do it than watch someone else do it.

I prefer a good book. I used to go to my nearest Waterstones and spend half a day looking through the photography section, then choose something that really got me excited about what photography could do. I still have just about all of those books and they still affect me now.

Last month I received a surprise present from a dear friend, Russ Young in America. He very kindly sent me the latest book by Sally Mann called Art Work.

I opened the package and my wife immediately took it to read. I was almost finished with another book on the painter Evelyn Dunbar and wanted to finish it before starting something totally different, so that was fine. Every day she would say to me that the book was right up my street and how it kept reminding her of the way I worked and my philosophy. As soon as I could, I made it my morning read with my first coffee. The book is mostly writing and the few pictures that are reproduced are not printed well, but the writing is really inspiring. It definitely made me reassess how I had let things get in the way of producing good work. I found myself revived and excited about it again, so thanks Russ if you are reading this. I would recommend it to others who need reminding of their original passion.

Thanks for reading, of course I haven’t had time to print any new work to illustrate this article, so I have peppered it with images from my archive.

Christmas and New Year - I will write another article next week, then take a break, the 5th of January will be the first of 2026.

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Thank you for reading, please let me know your thoughts.

Andrew Sanderson December 2025.

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Original hand made darkroom prints are available from my online shop; www.andrewsandersonphotography.bigcartel.com