Maëlick in the North

Toy Photography in Northern Finland, Sweden and Norway

Photography Diary – Winter 2022

Winter is slowly coming to an end and it’s time to reflect on the past months.

The way back to creativity

I’m still trying to go back slowly to photography.

At the end of 2021, I ordered a new “lens”. This decision came after weeks of careful thinking and this new piece of gear was supposed to get me unstuck. It would provide possibilities very different than all the lenses I’ve used in the past and take my photography in a whole new different direction.

While waiting for the lens, I finally wrote a blog post about my creative rut burnout at Stuck in Plastic. This blog post was based on several drafts I wrote but never published, some going back to several years ago. Without saying it too explicitly in the post, I knew that in 2022 my photography would need to fundamentally change.

The new piece of gear

I don’t want to talk too much about that new piece of gear, at least now. It took more time than I expected for it to arrive. When it did, the first tries were quite brutal. But very quickly, I got used to it and started to create images again. More importantly, I was feeling truly fulfilled and satisfied with those new images for the first time in ages.

But after a bit more than a month, the rut came back. I took hundreds of pictures, but I haven’t yet managed to completely sort and process them.

To be fair, I feel overwhelmed by those images as I don’t know yet where my photography is going and what to do with them. And the thought of piling more and more mew images blocks me when it comes to taking more photos. I’m however hoping that the change of season will push me both to deal with the photos I took during the winter, and take out my camera again.

Stuck in Plastic challenges

This month, I’m hosting weekly challenges at Stuck in Plastic. My goal is to share what I’ve experienced in the past months. Hosting these challenges has also acted as a deadline for sharing my recent images which no one had seen before.

The first challenge was about making images by turning technical flaws into strengths. The next challenges will be similar and try to push people in directions that I believe are often underexplored in toy photography.

Beyond trying to make people think about their photography, my personal hope is that hosting this challenge will push me back to sharing my photography. While I somehow managed to go back to taking new pictures, they have remained exclusive to my own eyes.

The need for closure

It feels like my photography is at a turning point. Yet, before figuring out what changes will become permanent and where I want to take my photography, I need to finish my past projects. Two years ago, I decided to put more focus on my personal website and blog. I created galleries centered around projects and series. Yet to this day, these galleries are far from complete.

I struggle a lot with editing and I often have tried to avoid the process of editing the series of images that are the dearest to me. Now seems the perfect time to stop procrastinating though. If I want to start a new page, I first need to turn the previous one, which means curating my own work and publishing it here.

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