Permission to Begin
Notes on a creative project...
Life after my Camp Notes project was full steam ahead. I photographed weddings back-to-back almost every weekend until mid-October, and since then I’ve been playing catch-up. This post has been sitting in my drafts for ages because I wasn’t sure if it mattered to anyone. But it matters to me, and I want to remember how this season felt. So here we go.
Spending a month shooting for myself this summer was incredibly rewarding. Before I ever left for this project, I’d spent months planning, worrying, second-guessing the whole thing, and wondering if any of it would pay off. My husband can confirm the number of times I asked him if I’d lost my mind.
I realise not everyone can take time off and pursue a creative project, and not every creative project needs to take a full month. With that said, I believe personal projects are incredibly important for anyone, but especially those in a creative field. This experience was so inspiring for me that I’m now trying to figure out how to create space every year for more of them!
Here is what I learned.
THE DIGITAL DETOX: One of the most valuable things I did during this time was to take a digital detox before, during, and after. I logged off Instagram and Pinterest (deleted them from my phone and paid for an app to block them from my computer).
Growing up in the 2000s with limited technology, I pulled my inspiration from magazines and built my own version of a Pinterest board between the pages of a journal. I loved flipping through magazines and still do. Magazines tell stories and have a page limit. Instagram, on the other hand, often feels like an endless stream of content I didn’t always want or need to see. The question I wanted to answer was: what kind of creative thinker was I before social media inundated my mind with other ideas? I wanted to have a blank canvas. I didn’t need to see the world around me; I wanted to be entirely engrossed in the story I was capturing — camp life — and I was.
During that month I felt more confident than I have ever been about my skills as a photographer and the nature of what I was doing. Every day I was inspired, and the creative thoughts and ideas were flowing rapidly.
OWNERSHIP & CREATIVE FREEDOM: As a photographer, in order for me to get a paycheque I often find myself doing jobs where I don’t call the shots (literally and metaphorically). Sometimes I have to work with brands I don’t love, or perhaps produce a collection of images that I’m not as proud of, but at the end of the day, it’s a job. Personal projects are the perfect time to have complete ownership over a body of work. No one is telling you how to shoot or how to approach the brief. It’s all yours, to get wrong and to get right. It’s you and the project in front of you. I loved this. My schedule was my own, and I worked as hard or as little as I felt I needed to.
STYLE & EXPERIMENTATION: Like most freelance gigs as a photographer, I’m bound by the shoot at hand and what needs to be captured. This usually dictates my settings and what I need to be prioritising with each shot. Often my clients hire me for my style and my eye, but those photoshoots still require me to shoot somewhat by the book. This project gave me an entire month of experimentation. I had a camera in my hand for 31 days straight, which meant every day I was looking at angles differently, playing with light differently than before, taking shots with risky camera settings to see if it paid off. I can already see that what I learned in that one month has changed the way I approach and photograph in my day-to-day jobs.
THE ART OF CURATION: My dream for this project is to produce this collection of images into a coffee table book and hopefully an exhibition. My goal this winter has been to start the submission process. I have hundreds of images from this project that I love and will have to curate down to a small number in order to capture the attention of a publisher.
Curating a collection of images has been by far the hardest part of this entire process. My skills in this area are very underdeveloped, as I’m often against deadlines for sending my images in and don’t have the time to spend weeks reviewing the images over and over again. In this case, I have been sitting on these images for a few months now, going back to them and stepping away to let my eyes get a fresh perspective. Even little debates like whether to keep an image I love simply because it reminds me of a moment, rather than because it’s compositionally strong, have been part of the process. Whatever the outcome will be — as I’m not there yet — the time I’ve set aside to curate has already taught me so much.
TELLING YOUR STORY: Find a story you want to tell. For me, it started with curiosity. My memories from summer camp are so vibrant, and I needed to go back and breathe the same camp air again as an adult. So in 2019 I volunteered to go back as the camp photographer for one week. What I captured then (which wasn’t great) sparked something in me. I went back again in 2024, only to realise the project had room to grow, so I returned in 2025 to create something bigger.
So, I hope this inspires you to create a project. It can be small and short or long form. Maybe there is a story that has been lying dormant that you need to bring to life? Maybe this is your nudge to begin.
P.S. The Camp Notes space is still alive, I’m just trying to figure out what’s next. :)
love this - sounds like it was a meaningful month!
Thank you for that nudge.