Feeling Jaded About Taking Photographs

When I get ambushed by a really nasty cold and cough - the kind that means I need to sleep in a chair and gives me aching ribs from the coughing, so I can't mope on the couch because if I do, it will set off a coughing fit and have me hacking up.... okay, you don't need any more details - when I get one of those, the best thing to do is start a project that requires minimal physical effort, and not much intellectual effort either, along with a fair degree of repetition.

Like going through my photograph collection, marking up the bangers, deleting the duplicates and the boring stuff that makes you think "WTF did I take that?", exporting the "meh" stuff, just in case you want to re-habilitate something. Also filling in the locations, since the X-E4 doesn't do that.

This exercise made me realise how few days I took photographs, and how limited my range of subjects was / is.

The last time I did any travelling off my beaten track was three weekends in 2013, and three trips in 2011. 2011 convinced me that travelling / holidays are best done with others - unless it's an annual week out from the domestic relationship - and the 2013 trips were done with a little group from my gym. (Ah, those were the days.) Once I'd reached that point, holidays were just expensive ways of entertaining myself for sixteen hours a day without any of the resources I had at home.

There are only so many shots I can take of the Barbican, the Thames, the West End, the City, the London Parks, and my "local area", before it gets repetitive. Same goes for pictures of autumn leaves lying around a tree, the Waterloo Bridge commuter peleton at 08:30, reflections of anything in any window, food, cups of coffee, cranes, building sites, long queues of red buses, little architectural features on the sides of buildings, people caught in the rain, crowds in markets, and so on and so forth. I started to get a distinct sense of the Been There - Done That's.

And I'm just going to say this. Anyone who says there's always something to photograph no matter where you are, has never lived in the suburbs, and never seen a potentially striking view obscured by trees that should have been hard-pruned four years ago. Large parts of modern towns and green spaces are simply un-inspiring and same-y. The UK can often be dull, dull, dull.

I admit, I'm getting old and more than a little jaded ("bored or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something") and I know that a man who is tired of London is tired of life, but I suspect daily life was a lot more exciting in Dr Johnson's day.

On the other hand, out of 5,400 photographs, I have 390 Favourites, which is 7%, and that's not bad.