There’s a particular kind of disappointment that photographers don’t talk about enough. Not the disappointment of a bad shoot, or missing the light, or coming home with nothing worth keeping. Those things sting, but you understand them. They make sense.
The one I’m talking about is subtler. It’s the feeling you get when you look at your landscape photographs from a location, and then look at someone else’s photographs from the same place, and feel like yours aren’t good enough. Like you failed. Like you might as well not have bothered.
I know that feeling well. I lived with it for years.
Landscape photography makes this worse than almost any other genre. The locations are fixed. Everybody is standing in the same spot, pointing their camera at the same mountain, the same coastline, the same famous waterfall. The only variable is the conditions. And conditions are the one thing you can’t control. The light, the weather, the atmosphere, none of it waits for you. Someone else might have been standing in that exact spot when the golden hour light was doing something extraordinary, when the exposure practically set itself, when everything just aligned. You turn up a month later to flat grey skies and wonder why your images don’t have the same quality of light.
The problem isn’t replication
When I started photography, I did what most beginners do. I looked at what other people were shooting and assumed that was what I should be shooting too. I’d find an image I loved, look up the location, and go there with the intention of replicating what I’d seen. And there’s actually nothing wrong with that when you’re starting out. Replication is one of the fastest ways to learn. You’re studying composition, understanding light, training your eye. If you’re in the early stages of your photography journey, going out and deliberately trying to recreate something you admire is a completely valid way of building skills.
The problem isn’t replication. The problem is comparison.
Because here’s the thing about those photographs you’re looking at online. The ones that stop you mid-scroll, the ones that make you feel like your version of the same location is somehow lacking. You have no idea when they were taken. You don’t know how many times that photographer visited before they got that shot. You don’t know whether they waited two years for the right conditions, or whether they just happened to be standing there on the one morning in a decade when everything aligned perfectly. All you’re seeing is the result. The context is invisible.
What you’re doing, without realising it, is holding your single visit up against the best version of that location that anyone has ever photographed. Not one person’s work on one day. Everyone’s best work, collected across years. You’re comparing your rainy Tuesday against somebody’s perfect September morning with pink alpenglow on the mountains. And then wondering why yours doesn’t measure up.
How I learned this the hard way
COVID was when it first hit me. I’d been travelling a lot, shooting constantly, posting regularly. And like a lot of people during lockdown, I found myself scrolling more than I normally would. Not just photography. All of it. The news, the arguments, the endless stream of things that made me feel worse for having looked at them. At some point I recognised what it was doing to me, not just to my photography, but to my general state of mind. I’ve written in more detail about how the algorithm shapes what we shoot over on this post if you want the fuller picture on that side of things.
That recognition didn’t fix anything overnight. For the next five years I went back and forth. Stepping away for a while, drifting back, telling myself I had it under control, realising I didn’t. Anyone who’s tried to change a habit they’ve had for years will know exactly what that cycle looks like.
It’s only in the last six months that I properly committed to it. And the difference has been extraordinary.
I want to be clear about what that actually meant in practice, because I think people assume the answer is to quit social media entirely. I didn’t do that. I still post. I still share work on Instagram and Facebook under both Chasing Light Tours and my own name. What I stopped doing was consuming. I use browser extensions now to block the news feed on every platform. No Instagram feed. No Facebook feed. No YouTube homepage. I go in, I post, I leave. The apps aren’t on my phone at all. My phone is on do not disturb around the clock, and the only notifications I allow are from WhatsApp and my bank. That’s it.
What that’s done for my creative life in six months I genuinely didn’t see coming. I’ve started writing properly. I’ve started drawing. My head has room in it that wasn’t there before, and ideas form in a way they simply didn’t when every quiet moment was being filled with someone else’s content.
And with the camera, the shift has been just as clear. I stopped arriving at locations with someone else’s image already sitting in my head. I stopped measuring what I came home with against a highlight reel I’d been passively absorbing for years. I was just there, looking at what was actually in front of me.
The photographs became more personal. Not necessarily more dramatic. Not the kind of images that do big numbers online. But mine. Entirely mine. And I was happier with them than I’d been with anything I’d shot in years.
The comparison had been affecting more than just my confidence. It was affecting what I chose to photograph, where I chose to go, and how I felt when I got there. I’d been letting other people’s best moments quietly shape my own creative decisions without even realising it was happening.
What I see on tours
I still see it on tours. Not always as blatant comparison, but in a related habit that amounts to the same thing. People arrive having done a lot of research. They’ve watched the location guides on YouTube, they’ve looked up the classic viewpoints, they have a clear idea in their head of the photograph they’re going to make. And sometimes that’s fine. Sometimes the conditions deliver, the light behaves, and they get something close to what they imagined.
But often they don’t. And when the reality doesn’t match the image in their head, the disappointment is real.
Shoot what you’re given, not what you wanted. Or you’ll go home severely disappointed.
I’ve said that to people on tours more times than I can count. It sounds simple. It is simple. But it takes a while to actually feel it rather than just hear it.
What I find, time and again, is that the photographs people are most excited about at the end of a tour aren’t the ones from the classic spots. They’re the ones they didn’t plan for. A few years ago in Lofoten, we pulled into a car park on the way to one of the well-known viewpoints, and on the walk across we stumbled across a scene that had nothing to do with where we were going. Nothing famous about it. Nothing you’d find in a location guide. But the light was doing something interesting, the composition was right there waiting, and you could see people change. The energy shifted completely. They weren’t trying to make someone else’s photograph. They were making their own.
That’s the version of photography I want people to find. And you can’t find it when you’re too busy measuring yourself against what already exists.
What I did instead
None of this means you should ignore other photographers’ work entirely. Looking at images you admire is one of the best ways to develop your eye, and that doesn’t stop being true no matter how long you’ve been shooting. But there’s a difference between looking at work that inspires you and looking at work as a measuring stick for your own.
The moment you catch yourself feeling like your photographs aren’t good enough because someone else had better conditions, better light, or a better version of the same morning you were both standing in, that’s the moment to stop and ask what you’re actually doing. Because that comparison is never fair, and it never will be. You can’t replicate someone else’s light. You can only work with the light you’ve got.
The photographers I’ve met who are most content with their work, and who consistently come home with images they’re proud of, are almost always the ones who stopped caring what other people were shooting. Not because they became arrogant about their own work, but because they got interested enough in their own photography that other people’s stopped mattering as much.
That shift doesn’t happen overnight. But it does happen. And when it does, going out with a camera starts to feel like something completely different.
You stop arriving at locations with a checklist. You start arriving curious.
None of what I’ve described will work for everyone, and I’m not suggesting it should. People are wired differently. What pulls me under might barely register for someone else, and what works as a fix for me might make no difference at all for you.
Part of why it works for me the way it does is that I’m pretty sure I have ADHD. I’ve never been diagnosed and I’m not looking to be, but I recognise the patterns clearly enough. When I’m focused on something, I need to be fully in it. Photography, writing, drawing, whatever it is, it gets everything or it gets nothing. The moment there’s a competing pull on my attention, I’m gone. So for me, removing the feed wasn’t a lifestyle preference. It was the only way I could actually function creatively. All or nothing is just how my brain works.
That context matters, because if you read what I’ve done and think it sounds extreme, you might be right, for you. The specifics don’t matter. What matters is being honest with yourself about what’s actually getting in the way of your photography, and whether you’re willing to do something about it.
For me, it meant removing the feed. For you it might be something else entirely. But if you find yourself regularly feeling like your photographs aren’t good enough, it’s worth asking whether the problem is your photography at all.
Leave a comment