Set a Goal That Has Nothing to Do With Photos, Get Better Photos

Every serious hobby eventually turns into a chore, and photography is no different. When you've come home empty-handed four or five outings in a row, the little voice telling you to quit gets loud, and beating it takes more than better planning.

That voice is exactly what James Popsys sets out to quiet in this video, where he shares a trick he uses to stay out shooting even when nothing feels worth photographing. He calls it NPG, or non-photography goals. The idea is simple. Pick a target that has nothing to do with taking pictures, then refuse to go home until you've hit it. His favorite is a step count. Twenty thousand steps, and until you've walked them, you're stuck outside with a camera in your hand.

Popsys is honest about why this works better than the obvious fixes. He could research locations, plan specific shots, or hike up a mountain for a guaranteed sunset. But a technically nice photo of a subject you don't care about ends up in the same place as a bad one, buried on a dusty hard drive. He also likes the thrill of not knowing what he'll find, which planning tends to kill. The step count sidesteps all of that by removing the decision to leave. You keep moving, and moving keeps you in the game long enough to actually see something.

There's a wider principle here that applies far beyond a pedometer. Popsys makes the case that photography is only worthwhile because it's hard, that good photos are supposed to be rare, and that if every shot landed, the whole thing would go stale fast. He compares it to golf. Being so good the ball goes exactly where you aim every time would be fun for a day, then tedious. Reframing difficulty as a feature rather than a flaw changes how you handle a bad day. Instead of reading an empty memory card as proof you're wasting your time, you read it as the normal cost of doing something with any value. That mental shift is what keeps you out on outing number six, which is the only place the next good frame can come from.

Popsys walks through several variations. The step count has a weakness he admits to. When it's cold or he's hungry, he'll convince himself nothing is happening and start walking just to keep the number climbing, which pulls him away from a spot that might have paid off. So he uses other structures instead. One is picking a route from A to B and back, chosen partly because his car is parked at A. Another is committing a fixed block of time to one place, like the ninety minutes he spends in Rhosneigr while his car sits in for a service. Each version does the same job of taking the decision to leave out of your hands, but they suit different moods and different days.

What makes his approach land is that he doesn't oversell it. He openly says he didn't come home with a standout shot after either 20,000-step walk, and that most of the frames he did get came inside the first 3,000 steps. That's the point, though. The goal isn't to manufacture a masterpiece on demand. It's to buy yourself enough time outside that a real opportunity has a chance to appear. He does spot a few he likes along the way, including dog walkers drifting closer as the tide comes in and the light finally breaks through a lone cloud parked, as he puts it, exactly over the sun.

His best advice arrives almost as an aside near the end. The ideal, he says, is to find something outdoors that makes you forget about photography entirely until a shot presents itself. Mountain biking, sitting on a bench with a friend, walking with a podcast. When your brain isn't grinding on whether the light is good enough, you notice more of what's actually in front of you. The non-photography goal is the backup plan for when that natural absorption won't come. If you can't lose yourself in the walk, at least give yourself a number that forces you to keep taking it.

If the well of motivation has run dry and you've caught yourself thinking about packing it in, watch the full video above to see how Popsys puts each of these goals into practice on real outings.