Photography – quarantine mode

For those that will be reading this post in the future, we are in May 2020, when the entire globe is under more or less restrict measures of lock down due to Coronavirus.

What does this means?

No travel between countries! Right now even travel within your country of residency is done with certain restrictions and we have more than two months at this point since we are under lock down at home – getting out just for essential things.

As you can imagine these restrictions can have a huge impact on our landscape/street photography hobby, our travel & creative plans for 2020. Our frustrations start to rise more and more as time goes by, because we are not able anymore to take our breath of fresh air every other weekend.

There are 2 things that we are missing during this time:

1. Our photography is stagnant for the time being, we miss the entire process: camera in our hand, the effort of finding a subject and composing an image.
2. The connection with the nature, being outside and physical activity related to our explorations.

What we did during this time?

I don’t know yet if it is good or bad, but we took a total photography break during this period. We put our work aside for the time being, not intentionally, but more as a way to come back to it with excitement when the time comes.

We remained physically active, we spent time together, Ionuț developed his baking skills, we tried to fill in our days in a meaningful way, although we didn’t always manage to do so. Also, some mediocre TV shows filled in some of our spare time.

What is important, now that the restrictions in the country begin to loosen, is that we have a plan in place until we will be able to travel abroad:

1. Explore local places – this is not one of my favorite things to do, mostly because Romania has a lot of natural parks that are huge chaotic forests, not the best places to photograph, at least not for me, but we need to adjust to what we have
2. Stay educated – look at the work of meaningful photographers and try to learn something new for when we will have the camera in our hands again
3. Explore places online for our future travels, even if it is just a dream plan for the time being
4. Go over our previous work – this is something that I am really ashamed that I haven’t done until now, but I plan to do it in the near future – look through my portfolio, through old images – almost always I come to find something interesting that catches my attention.

Quarantine is affecting all of us, especially the ones used to travel. It feels like it’s affecting our freedom. But at the same time, think of this as an opportunity to do all the things around the house that you didn’t have time to do before.

Take my advice and retrospect on your portfolio, on your future as a photographer and be ready, have a plan for when you will be able to travel again.