Lessons from a ‘failed’ year of photography: part one

I had high hopes for 2025. I set up a YouTube channel, created my first video where I declared my intention to create one video a month for the full year, and set out into the year with a full to-do list of video ideas and the ambition to make 2025 the year I finally did something meaningful and tangible with this hobby of mine.

That was the only video I made that year…

As is always the case, life got in the way. I was busy, things came up, I didn’t have enough energy to go out and shoot, and before I knew it the year raced away from me. But despite all the ‘failures’, I found myself reflecting on my year in photography and, affording myself a bit of slack and empathy, I’ve realised I still learned some important lessons along the way. And the year can only truly be a failure if I didn’t learn anything from it.

So with that, I share my list of lessons learned, and hopefully they can help someone else out there who might find themselves in a similar position.

Photography is a muscle

As a fan of street and documentary photography, so much of the work that inspires me is shot in two places—New York and Japan.

And as someone who has shot in Japan a few times over the years, I always feel so inspired by everything I see when I’m out there with a camera. It almost feels effortless and ‘easy’ to capture moments there.

But I don’t live in Japan, I spend 99% of my time in Australia, and not even one of the more ‘interesting’ cities like Melbourne or Sydney. I’m in little old Adelaide. For the longest time, this has created what I feel is a ‘trap’ in the way I think about my photography practice. There’s always a need to go somewhere ‘more interesting’ and I tell myself that’s when I’ll create some great work that I’m really proud of.

In 2025, that somewhere was Singapore. We had a trip planned, and I was so excited to go shoot there. In my head I felt like this was where I would take some really great shots and come back with a body of work that I could share on social media for months.

But looking at my shots after the trip, I was just… underwhelmed.

Everything was ‘fine’ but nothing that I was super proud of, and as I critiqued my own work I realised what was missing.

Practice.

And it wasn’t even the technical side of things with the camera and my exposures. It was my approach and my ability to notice.

It was scenes where I didn’t take the time to try different compositions and find the great one, settling instead for the obvious and uninteresting ones.

It was scenes where I didn’t have the confidence or the awareness to move myself in closer, to capture a moment or interaction in a way that translated properly to my image.

And it was a complete lack of patience when I did find a great scene and composition, to slow down and wait for the right subject to make that image what it deserved to be.

Something that I have long known to be true, but managed to forget in 2025, is that the photographers whose work I admire and find so inspiring are not great photographers because of where they live and get to shoot, it’s because of how they see the world around them.

For me, I love the work of greats like Saul Leiter and Fred Herzog, and in the modern YouTube landscape it’s photographers like Faizal Westcott, Adrien Sanguinetti and James Popsys. I often remind myself that if I dropped any of these photographers into Adelaide, they’d probably still create great work that I’m sure I would still love and find inspiring.

The thing that was missing for me in Singapore was that photography ‘muscle’. Mine was weak, because for the months prior to that trip, I hadn’t been out even once to shoot street photography around Adelaide. There was no way I could expect to just pick up my camera for a week in Singapore and capture great shots because I was rusty in all the skills that actually matter.

Like any other muscle, you build it through putting in the reps.

In the time since that trip, I’ve been out and about far more to shoot in Adelaide. Exploring areas like Port Adelaide and Torrensville, and for a city I long felt was ‘too boring’ to create the work I wanted, I’d dare say I’ve even taken some photos I’m proud of.

And hey, maybe if you too live in a ‘boring’ location, then the added degree of difficulty in shooting around your local area will only make your photography muscle even stronger when you do visit those dream locations and have the chance to shoot there.