It Doesn’t Matter if You’re Shit at Photography

This may come as a surprise to anyone who came of age after the year 2000, but there was a time before social media where people just ‘did’ hobbies.

There was sometimes a competitive element to these pastimes, but it was usually a minor part. There was hardly ever any public showcase of results, and the vast majority of hobbies were pursued in beautiful isolation, completely free of any group dynamic.

Trainspotting, bird watching, brass rubbing, model railways, Airfix kits, cross-stitch, tapestry, watercolours, jogging, jigsaws, metal detecting, amateur radio, pigeon racing, candle making, calligraphy, coin collecting, bonsai, rock polishing and making ships in bottles.

All hobbies you could just ‘do’.

When I was a kid, some of my friends used to collect stamps. I had a very brief go at it myself in fact. I had a Stanley Gibbons album, a selection of cheap but exotic looking stamps from places like Guinea Bissau and a heap of those little gummy hinges made by Dennison’s that I would use to squish the stamps into place in rows so haphazard they should surely have been exhibit A at my ADHD diagnosis.

I didn’t belong to any stamp collecting clubs and the limited research I did took place in the library. Nobody knew I collected stamps and, had I ever been one to engage in general conversation with ‘people’, I can absolutely guarantee you that stamps would never have come up. For a short while, it was just something that I did. Something to occupy myself with when I wasn’t at school. Something to let me be in my own head for a bit.

And once upon a time, the vast majority of hobbies were exactly the same.

I have no idea how I arrived at the idea of collecting stamps, but I rapidly came to the conclusion that it was not for me, and that hurling myself off garage roofs and up municipal drain pipes (long before some pretentious wanker thought to call it parkour) was a pursuit far more worthy of my considerable and tragically under-appreciated talents.

I moved on to other things … but never fishing.

Not that there’s anything wrong with fishing, many of my friends enjoyed it, it just had absolutely no appeal to me.

Fishing had a competitive element, but the vast majority of fishermen and fisherwomen couldn’t give a monkeys about that. They just enjoyed going down to the old canal or town pond and sitting on a camp chair in the drizzle, staring fixedly at a line that was never likely to sink with a bite until the heat death of the universe. The simple act of going fishing was all it was about.

Does that mean they never evolved as fisher-people? Quite the opposite, I dare say they got adept at all sorts of fishing-related skills: sticking wriggling yellowy maggots on fishing hooks, remaining so still a mummified Tibetan monk would be impressed, pouring tea from a Stanley flask into a plastic cup one-handed, and frowning at canal boats when they forced them to pull in the line.

But, and here’s the important bit, regimented improvement and competition were never the point, they were just a natural side-effect of ‘doing’.

Fisherman could enter fishing competitions if that was something that interested them, but it wasn’t the entire driving force of the hobby.

And when I first became interested in photography, in the very early 1980s, the idea of competition could not have been further from my mind. I just liked everything about photography and, being an undiagnosed autistic kid, it became something of an obsession.

I had my own cheap film cameras, but I realised that getting photographs developed and printed quickly exhausted my meagre resources, so I learned to develop my own film and make my own prints. I bought my own enlarger, a job lot of Ilford paper and, ermmm, ‘borrowed’ all the other supplies from the school darkroom, since I was literally the only student that had used it in a decade.

I didn’t share any of the photographs I took with anyone and my knowledge came mainly from simply doing the thing.

There were photography magazines of course, but at that time, many of those magazines seemed to stray too close to soft porn territory with monthly ‘glamour’ shoots that didn’t look too dissimilar to the actual soft porn found in top shelf Mayfair and Fiesta magazines. And I couldn’t stand the judgemental looks when I handed over my 60 pence to the shop assistant in WH Smiths, even though the cover quite clearly said ‘Testing the New Mamiya 645’ and not ‘50 Ways to Make Mammaries Look Bigger’.

Photographers could enter photography competitions if they wanted and camera club culture was certainly a thing back then, but it was hardly cut-throat stuff.

You’d sit in a dark village hall watching projected Kodachromes while someone with a clipboard said, “Excellent tonal separation… but I find the gate slightly intrusive.”

That was about as competitive as it got.

The winning photo, chosen perhaps by a visiting professional, would be awarded a gold star, camera club chums would pat the winning photographer on the back … and that was it. Competitions weren’t the be all and end all of camera clubs, they were simply one side of the hobby that you could indulge in if you wanted to.

There are many reasons why hobbies shed their genteel edge, but we all know who the main culprit is.

Social media has well and truly buggered up a huge number of pastimes, hobbies and recreational pursuits. They have turned into activities where the primary purpose is not to just ‘do’ but to ‘do’ better than the next guy: more prizes, more views, more likes, more exposure, more clout.

And the hobby of photography, among many others, has been utterly transformed by this process.

I’m a landscape photographer and I strongly believe that social media is the reason that photographs slowly started looking the same, trending towards the same visual average. Because those photos that did well were, you can’t argue with the logic, the photographs that should be imitated. So rather than developing their own style, their own colour looks, their own techniques, as they would have done in the past, photographers started chasing the algorithm instead of trusting their own eye.

The idea of just ‘doing’ photography became some antiquated concept and everyone (oh yes, including me!) got on the treadmill where the output was all that mattered, not the act.

Every corner of the internet became a photography competition. Instagram was the top of the pile, but even dear old mild-mannered Flickr had an ‘Explored’ page and before long, photographers who’d never entered a competition in their lives were refreshing their notifications like gamblers watching a roulette wheel.

And along the way, folks who thought they didn’t measure up, who compared their photographs against everyone else, they gave up. They didn’t make a big song and dance about it, they didn’t throw a tantrum and storm off with their football, they didn’t scream abuse at the assembled throng like a subway pisshead … they just stopped.

We have social media to thank for that, for making people feel like ‘winning’ was the point.

Folks, it’s time to get off the hamster wheel, to jettison that competitive bullshit and to begin just ‘doing’ hobbies like photography.

Of course if competition is the only thing that gets you out of bed in the morning, fill your boots. Score a sports goal. Do a trophy. Win the thing.

But for everyone else … friends … the point was never really about being good at it.

It doesn’t have to be performative and it doesn’t have to be a competition.

Just begin. Do. Repeat.

It doesn’t matter if you spent a lot on your camera and you don’t know how to fully use it. It doesn’t matter if you look at other photographs and think that you’ll never measure up to that standard. It doesn’t matter how many followers you’ve got on Instagram, Pixelfed or Bluesky. It doesn’t matter if someone takes the piss out of you for doing it. It doesn’t matter if you always have to do it on your own. It doesn’t matter if you come home with 200 shots and keep three. It doesn’t matter if your partner rolls their eyes every time you stop the car. It doesn’t matter if nobody ever asks to see them. It doesn’t matter if you forgot your tripod and had to balance the camera on a fence post. It doesn’t matter if your best photograph is of a bin.

Nobody’s keeping score.