💫 How to Keep Growing as a Photographer Over Time with Gary Randall
Decide what to change, what to keep, and how to sustain a photography practice that still feels like your own.
For Episode 39 of Shutter Nonsense, photographer Gary Randall joined us to talk about nearly a quarter century of making photographs, adapting his methods, and holding onto the reasons he started. His experience anchors this guide, with additional practical suggestions for keeping your own photography rewarding as your skills and circumstances change.
After you've photographed for a while, change can become surprisingly uncomfortable. A technique you once worked hard to learn feels limiting, or a familiar location no longer offers the same experience and spark of interest. You may also see a new approach or trend everywhere and wonder whether ignoring it means you're falling behind, even if you don't particularly like the photographs it produces.
At the same time, sticking with what you know can feel reassuring. You've developed preferences, built a body of work, and found methods you trust; all are worthwhile achievements. But how do you tell when a familiar approach still serves you and when you're simply repeating it because it's familiar?
Gary offers a useful perspective because he hasn't stopped learning, even after decades of experience. He's willing to reconsider how he works while remaining clear about what he wants photography to mean in his life. You can use that distinction to decide what deserves to change in your own practice and what you want to carry forward.
What You'll Learn
These ideas will help you make room for growth without feeling a need to reinvent your photography every time something new comes along.
✓ Separate values from habits. Identify which choices express what matters to you and which are simply methods you've become used to.
✓ Test changes for a useful reason. Evaluate a technique or tool against an actual photographic need rather than its popularity.
✓ Recognize when consistency becomes a rut. Experiment without treating every departure as a permanent change to your style.
✓ Keep your boundaries meaningful. Connect honesty and care for locations to the choices you make in practice.
✓ Give yourself reasons to continue. Build learning, personal satisfaction, and finished work into your photography over time.
Know What You Want to Carry Forward
Gary's photography grew out of backpacking and a desire to bring home better photographs of his trips. It also became a source of personal steadiness during a difficult period of his life: the camera gave him a reason to be outside, something to improve at, and an activity he wanted to keep doing.
That history helps explain why he doesn't want audience expectations deciding the direction of his work. Photography already has a purpose for him before anyone ever sees the result. When he talks about its therapeutic role, he's describing his own experience, not prescribing a solution for other people's difficulties, but it's a common theme among artists in general.
For your own photography, start by naming something you want to preserve. Perhaps it's attentive time outdoors, honest representation of what you experienced, the satisfaction of making a print, or the freedom to follow a visual interest. Be specific enough that the answer can help you make a decision.
Then separate that value from the method you've attached to it. Enjoying time in nature doesn't require a difficult hike on every outing; caring about composition doesn't require using the same focal length forever; valuing a truthful relationship with a scene doesn't require refusing every new editing tool. The question is what the change allows you to do and whether that fits your intentions.
This distinction leaves you room for changing circumstances, too. If your available time, mobility, or energy changes, adapting the scale of an outing can preserve something you care about. A shorter visit, for instance, isn't automatically a lesser version of photography, and it's worth considering whether it still gives you the experience you wanted from picking up the camera in the first place.
Let a Real Question Guide What You Learn
Gary remembers early digital-camera improvements opening possibilities that had previously been difficult, including photographing the night sky. At the time of our conversation, though, he was still happy using his Nikon D850. With modern camera tech being as good as it is (even going back 5-10 years), he doesn't see a reason to replace equipment that continues to do what he needs.
His lesson isn't that equipment never matters, but that its value depends on the problem you're trying to solve. A new capability may be significant for one photographer and almost irrelevant to another. You don't need to make the same purchasing decision as Gary, or anyone else, to apply his reasoning. Doing something just for the sake of keeping up with what others are doing likely won't bring you any greater sense of fulfillment, nor will it do anything to help you grow as a photographer.
Before committing time or money to a change, write down the limitation you've actually encountered. Are you struggling to hold attention within the composition? Missing focus in a particular situation? Finding that your finished files don't convey what interested you in the field? Those are more useful starting points than a general feeling that everyone else has moved on.
Give a new technique a job before you give it a permanent place in your workflow.
Begin by choosing a small test that addresses the limitation you feel you've encountered. If composition is the problem, a different camera body may give you plenty to learn without helping you actually improve your framing of scenes. Try reviewing why one composition works and another doesn't, then return with that question in mind. If a technical capability really is the obstacle, investigate whether a different method or tool resolves it.
Gary is equally open about changing his knowledge over the years. He began teaching workshops in 2013 and readily acknowledges that some things he taught earlier are things he now does differently, or recognizes were just wrong and the result of a lack of knowledge on his part. That's an especially useful reminder when experience starts to feel like a position you have to defend.
You can revise a method without dismissing everything it helped you learn. Keep the question concrete: what do you understand now that you didn't understand when you adopted it?
Keep a Recognizable Style Without Closing Off Possibilities
Gary traces some of his compositional preferences back to an art teacher who helped him understand visual harmony and what belongs inside a frame. That background continues to influence his photographs as he still tends to favor more compact compositions over the very close foregrounds associated with ultra-wide views.
He also admits that being true to his style can sometimes keep him in his own groove, which isn't neccessarily a good thing. That's a more interesting position than simply insisting you should ignore trends, as a personal preference can be meaningful and still deserve an occasional challenge.
Look at a small selection of your recent work. Are you choosing similar compositions because those relationships continue to interest you or are you dismissing alternatives before you've really considered them? Repetition alone doesn't answer that question as a sustained subject can offer years of exploration, while a different destination every week can still produce the same habitual decisions.
For a practical test, keep the subject familiar and change one part of your approach. If you usually work wide, look for a tighter relationship. If you tend to isolate details, spend time considering how one smaller piece fits into a larger scene. Work from an appropriate established position and keep your usual care for the location while recognizing that you don't need to change everything to discover whether another approach offers something useful.
Review the experiment separately from deciding whether to share it. What became easier to see? What felt forced? Did the change help communicate something you care about? It's critical to remember that a photograph can be useful to your development without belonging in your public portfolio; your failures are just as much a part of the learning process as your successes.
These are exercises for applying the discussion, not a routine Gary prescribed. Their purpose is to give you evidence for a choice. You might discover a direction worth pursuing, or return to your familiar approach with a clearer understanding of why you like it.
Make Deliberate Decisions Before Making More Frames
Gary describes becoming more purposeful in the field as his confidence grew over time. When he can arrive to a location early, he looks for several possible compositions for when the light he wants to photograph in arrives. He checks exposure, focus, and composition, considers whether additional frames are needed for the result (such as exposure or focus bracketing), and moves between the options he identified beforehand rather than repeatedly making essentially the same photograph without a reason.
That approach gives learning a more specific target: instead of hoping one of many frames will work, you're deciding what the next frame needs to accomplish. Additional exposures may be useful when light, movement, or your chosen technique calls for them; the issue is whether you can explain why you're making the decisions.
Try pausing after a promising frame. Examine the edges, check whether the intended subject holds your attention, and look for the technical problem most likely to undermine the image. Make a reasoned adjustment you can name. If the photograph already does what you wanted, consider another composition or simply spend a little time observing.
The review afterward becomes more informative when you remember those prior decisions. You can connect a result to something you tried, rather than facing a long string of nearly identical frames and wondering what really changed as you stood in one spot making essentially the same photo over and over. Over time, that gives you a more useful basis for confidence than the number of photographs you brought home.
Adapt to Changing Places Without Abandoning Your Standards
Some changes happen outside your photography. Gary has watched familiar locations become more heavily visited and has seen damage to places he once encouraged others to explore. That's changed how he thinks about sharing precise locations and where he directs people.
His distinction is practical: a place with infrastructure for visitors is different from a small, fragile area that could be damaged by additional attention. He describes putting the location ahead of the photograph and making his approach explicit through a published code of ethics on his website.
The broader application for you is to let present conditions affect your decisions. Knowing a place for years doesn't mean yesterday's approach is still appropriate today. Pay attention to visible wear, current access restrictions, and the effect your presence, or the example you set, may have on the location and on other visitors. A familiar composition doesn't entitle you to make it under any conditions.
Michael described this in terms of photographing around crowds in Grand Teton National Park. Beyond his own intended care, he considered what behaviors of his other visitors might copy. That adds another question to a field decision: what might my behavior encourage when someone sees the action without knowing my reasoning?
You can retain your interest in a location while changing where you stand, when you visit, or whether you make a photograph at all. Those decisions are part of an adaptable practice, even if they never appear in the finished portfolio.
Be Able to Stand Behind How You Made the Work
Gary's boundaries also include how he processes and presents photographs. He wants to feel comfortable with his own decisions and wants people to believe the work he presents as photography. He explicitly says compositing isn't inherently wrong; honesty about what was made matters to him.
There was a useful difference in emphasis during our conversation. Michael considered whether he would feel embarrassed or hypocritical if someone saw the raw file and his final edits, while Gary clarified that his own boundary comes primarily from within, rather than from anticipating someone else's reaction. Both perspectives can prompt reflection, but they aren't quite the same test.
For your own work, identify what you want viewers to understand about the image, then consider whether your presentation supports that understanding. If you've combined different scenes or added significant elements that weren't really present, don't rely on people recognizing the alteration for themselves. Explain the work in a way that fits how you made it.
You can also decide a process simply doesn't suit you, even when you respect another photographer's use of it. Being open to learning doesn't oblige you to adopt every possibility. It does help to understand why you're accepting or dismissing a change, so your boundary reflects a considered choice rather than an assumption you haven't revisited.
Give the Work a Life Beyond the Feed
When asked what he hopes his photography communicates, Gary talks about people who have contacted him to describe what his photographs mean to them. He values that personal connection and hopes the work can continue to affect people positively.
He also encourages photographers to make printed portfolios of their work for themselves, beyond whatever they might sell or even display. His own examples are simple photographs on paper that he stores away for revisiting and as a personal archive. Making your own prints doesn't require turning every image into a large piece of wall art or an elaborate commercial product.
A small printed selection can give your work a place in your everyday life, outside the cycle of posting and checking responses. Choose a few photographs you'd want to keep seeing, and consider what they say together. You might share the selection with someone, revisit it later, or let it remain a personal record. Of course, keep protecting your digital files too; a print portfolio or archive serves a different purpose from a backup of your digital files.
Gary's motivation to continue also depends on feeling that he's learning. You don't have to wait for a major breakthrough to recognize that kind of personal progression. A more deliberate field decision, an experiment that clarifies a preference, or a finished selection can give you something concrete to build on, one step at a time.
Put It Into Practice
Use one familiar subject and one manageable outing to test a change while keeping an important personal value in view.
✓ Name what you're preserving. Write one sentence about what you want the outing to provide, such as attentive time outdoors or a truthful photograph of a scene you care about.
✓ Choose one habit to examine. Pick a familiar compositional or technical choice and explain why you want to test an alternative.
✓ Make a purposeful comparison. Photograph with your usual approach, then try the alternative without compromising access rules or care for the place. Note what you changed and why.
✓ Review the decision as well as the image. Identify what the experiment revealed, whether you want to repeat it, and what you can disregard.
✓ Finish something small. Select a photograph to print or add to a modest personal collection. Give the work a use beyond being another file to sort through later.
Afterward, ask: did this change help me express what matters to me, or did it mainly give me another expectation to satisfy? Your answer can guide the next outing without becoming a permanent rule.
Hear Gary Reflect on Nearly Twenty Five Years of Photography
In Episode 39, Gary brings personal history and candor to questions that rarely have a tidy answer. Hear him describe the confidence that comes with experience, the comfort photography has provided, the ways teaching has changed his thinking, and why his dogs have always been part of the life he built around a camera.
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