Holidaying at home

I am always looking for ways to try and encourage me to take more photographs. Sometimes it’s a simple question of going somewhere new, maybe on holiday. Everything is novel and exciting when you are on holiday and you see everything with fresh eyes.

How can you replicate that excitement when you are not on holiday? How can you bring those fresh eyes home with you?

One way to do this is to think like you’re on holiday when you are back at home. This isn’t about holidaying at home; a lot of us probably experienced that rather too much during the pandemic. And I certainly don’t mean heading to the supermarket in your swimwear!

What I am thinking about is trying to look at your photography in a different way, perhaps by simply switching genres. I live in an urban setting so when I go out to take pictures locally they are usually street photography or photographs of buildings. I spend my time looking out for people and architecture.

If I switch genres perhaps I will start seeing the familiar in a different light.

So I thought I would try landscape photography. Most of the photographs I take in this style are usually out in the countryside or at the seaside but there is a branch of urban photography and this is what I decided to explore recently to see how it could make me look at my local neighbourhood in a different way and with fresh eyes, as if I were on holiday.

When I am on holiday I explore; I go down one road, stop, turn around and look back, then I head down some alleyway to see what might be at the end of it. I will look up and down, climbing high or getting down as low as possible, even getting down on the ground, to look at things from a different angle.

One afternoon I turned right out of my front door and went to try photographing as if I were on holiday.

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So here are my holiday snaps 🙂

Other ways you could see your neighbourhood in a different light is perhaps by seeing it at a different time of day – try getting up early or staying out late and seeing what it looks like then.

Or maybe in different weather conditions. We don’t get much snow in London but we did before Christmas 2022. I needed to walk only a few metres out of my front door and the world I knew so well suddenly looked very different.

So when you are having trouble being inspired to take photographs imagine you are on holiday! And, of course, it’s always worth bearing in mind that the new and exciting for you when you are on holiday is the old and mundane for the people who live there, and there might be people where you live who have just arrived either on holiday or to live there and are seeing your neighbourhood through fresh eyes.