Breaking the Voodoo
One Week, 200 Photos, and a Very Confused Dashboard...
Well, look at that. A whole week has passed since I publicly vowed to break my creative voodoo hoo-doo, and I am happy to report that the camera has officially left the house. It has been riding shotgun with me through every shift, sitting right there on the passenger seat like a silent, slightly judgmental co-pilot.
When I first wrote that I was going to start carrying it to exercise my mental muscle memory, I had grand visions of seamlessly capturing the fleeting beauty of human existence through my windscreen. In reality, the first few days felt less like a renaissance of artistic vision and more like trying to pat my head while rubbing my stomach and checking my mirrors all at the same time. There is a very fine line between “training your brain to see the world as an artist” and “missing your turning because the light hit a post office pillar box just right.”
The Verdict: 200 Shots and a Lot of Blurry Tarmac
Despite the logistical comedy of juggling a private hire career with a newfound determination to re-learn how to get into the habit of clicking the shutter, I have actually managed to take a couple of hundred shots over the last seven days.
Now, let us be completely honest about the data pool here. If you were hoping this week’s follow-up would feature a breath-taking, gallery-ready masterpiece of the South Yorkshire landscape, you might want to manage your expectations. Out of those two hundred photos, a significant percentage are accidental bursts of the rubber floor mats, highly detailed studies of my own dashboard dust, and several blurry abstract compositions that are just the side-view mirror moving at thirty miles per hour.
But amongst the chaos of the digital cutting-room floor, something interesting started to happen. The brain actually listened.
By simply having the camera within arm’s reach, my mind stopped treating the environment as just a series of obstacles to navigate between drop-offs. I started noticing the dramatic way the storm clouds were gathering over the horizon between fares. I caught the exact moment the late afternoon sun cut through a gap in the terrace houses, turning a mundane street into something atmospheric and moody. I didn’t always capture it perfectly—sometimes the traffic light changed too fast, or duty called—but the crucial thing is that I saw it.
Waking Up the Visual Hunter
That is the real victory of week one albeit a very minor one, but I will take it. The stakes were low, the photos are messy, but the muscle memory is definitely waking up from its long nap. Probably still having a good old stretch and a yawn or two but it is waking up nonetheless.
I am gradually shifting from a passive observer staring through a windscreen to an active visual hunter again.
It turns out that creativity doesn’t require a trip to Paris or a grand expedition to the peak district to show its face. Sometimes it just requires you to look at the world you are already moving through with slightly wider eyes, even if you are just waiting in a supermarket car park for your next passenger to jump in.
The dry spell isn’t completely over, and the masterpiece is still hiding somewhere down the road, but the camera is out of its box, my finger is back on the shutter, and the voodoo is officially on notice.
To help me on the way and to deliberately remove the complexity of carrying my normal Nikon DSLR around with me and trying to reboot framing, exposure, etc. and all that jazz I have bought myself a quirky KLIK camera - no focussing, framing or worrying about exposure or anything else that comes with a DSLR. It feels rather cheap (it was), plastic-y (it is) but I can simply point and press. Its like a disposable camera with a memory card instead of an analogue film and it has 4 built in filters so you don’t even have to post process (the black and white one is excellent).
The images above were taken using this wonderfully simple piece of kit.