I’m Using My Camera to Lower My Stress in Life

At nearly 40, I’m glad to say that I’ve beaten obesity and worked really hard on being as fit and active as I possibly can be. A lot of my health problems are stress related from running this business. And so recently, I’ve been trying to change my approach to life. Instead of trying to do something to react to the stress, I’m actively working to lower it. For that, I’m taking inspiration from web research, the sage words of elder photographers, and my camera. It’s about lowering my cortisol.

Before I go on, I’m going to say this outright and be transparent with the Phoblographer’s readers the way that I’ve always been. I’m not a medical expert. But at least here in America, I feel like I’ve been failed by the medical world on several sides. Our system emphasizes the ideas of using band-aids to fix problems instead of actually addressing and dealing with them. And it doesn’t help us in meaningful ways. So I started changing my habits out of frustration of this and it has really begun to help me out.

Do with this information what you will. I’m not telling you that you should follow it. But I’m writing it to hopefully motivate people to realize that our photography hobby can be something that we truly recognize deep joy in. And that we should catch and stop ourselves when we’re feeling frustrated.

I remember many years ago when I first was working on making Phoblographer my full-time job, everyone would ask me what creative projects I was working on. And I couldn’t name any simply because I was just so burned out and pre-occupied with running the site. Visually, you could tell that on me when you looked at me. I was around 24 years old then and at 39 years old, some of that literally still weighs on me.

In many ways, I lost the joy of actually making images. Instead, it just became something I had to do for my job. And to this day, that’s still mostly the case. So I incorporate products into my daily life and work to give myself the feeling of adventure everytime I go somewhere. If you look at the images I post in my reviews, you’d think that I was having a blast all the time. But the truth is that my body and my mind can’t always escape the stress of hyper-capitalism and the insane taxes that small business owners need to pay. Plus, remember, I’m legally blind in a society where everything is visual.

So recently, I’ve been working with a dietitian to lower my fat levels because my fitness is incredible. I box, weight train, walk, and do hot yoga multiple times a week. But there’s also another factor stacked against me: genetics. I was born here in NYC where I’ve lived my entire life. My parents are Indian (dots, not feathers) from Guyana. Indians got to Guyana after the British tricked them into working the fields when African slavery was outlawed. There, they experienced a whole lot of issues around food and stress. Often, they were poor and probably didn’t always have enough to eat. Additionally, Indian went through something probably close to 200 years or so of famine. Much of this was caused by colonization.

Famine puts the body through some extreme stress over the years. And the result is that we’ve become super absorbers for cholesterol. Essentially, we have to more or less be malnourished to live a healthy life — or at least that’s what every doctor has been teaching me in one way or another. Combine this with the American diet and lifestyle and the fact that I’m a single man in the loneliest time in the history of the world, and things always look like obstacles.

So what’s an overweight, legally blind journalist specializing in cameras so supposed to do?

Well, I’ve been trying to incorporate my camera into an aspect of walking. Two particular practices that I’ve been following are forest bathing and the art of the slow walk/stroll.

Native New Yorkers walk at an insanely fast pace. And sometimes when I do this, I can hear my father’s voice from when he was around my age telling me to slow down and that we don’t need to rush. At the same time, he was also the one who taught me how to walk insanely fast. He knew when he wasn’t in danger or in a rush and understood when to slow down. I’m only learning that now because it was never explained to me. I’ve only ever had two walking speeds: fast and super fast. Friends, family, and girlfriends of mine have said similar things to me. But it has always just been built into my body.

With forest bathing, I intentionally slow my walking pace down as well as breathe deeply into my belly to relax myself. It’s essentially what you’d imagine when you see people strolling down the beach in cinema. But with me, I’m strolling through the woods, looking at the quality of the light coming through the forest canopy, connecting how I want an image to look in my head to the technical aspects of photography, and then intentionally making an image. When the birds are too stressed and making a lot of noise, I don’t walk in that direction. When people are walking their dogs off leash and they’re barking insanely loud, I stop and walk in another direction away from the stress.

This leads me to sometimes find things that are visually fascinating to me, so I make photographs this way. And honestly, I don’t care about what others think of the images because they’re not designed for others. On top of this, I stay off my phone unless I absolutely need to. Navigation is done using the sun and my watch acting as a compass for the most part. Combine this with being off of social media for nearly two years, and I’m doing the best that I can.

When I go for strolls in my neighborhood, I purposely choose to walk on more calming blocks than louder and more aggressive routes.

Am I always happy with the images? No. Do I care? No. Am I having fun? Yes. Am I doing something that ultimately brings me joy when I take photographs? Also, yes.

And isn’t that what a hobby is supposed to be about? My hobbies are about my pleasure and 100% have nothing to do with some assailant armed with a keyboard and a little bit of knowledge says about my images.