Make things you like most of all to get satisfaction. When you do what you love, you become a truly happy person. Love your work, people you work with. This is the key element of joy and high self-esteem. But even in a favorite profession, there are times when inspiration leaves. It is called a burning out moment when everything becomes gray and boring.

Photographers are creative people, their world is full of bokeh effects, portraits, and compositions. They are real artists of our time and inspiration accompanies them every second, every day they see us through the lens of their camera and are ready to take pictures at any time. When all the portraits are taken, all the moments are caught, comes the moment of the desperate need of something new. In order to make this period pass quickly and feel again a taste for wonderful photography, there are photography inspiration ideas that will help you to get back to your fine art.

1. Get back to basics

Remember why you started doing images of people, landscapes or sites around you. What prompted you to do this, and how your career began. Maybe it was a selfie, or you used an iPhone for a romantic post on Facebook for your girlfriend, shot ocean or captured amazing wedding stories. Such memories will help you understand why you started shooting.

2. Take a short trip

Do not book a ticket to Nepal or move to a monastery to get back to your mood. There are new places within an hour's drive from the house: areas of the hometown that you have never been to. Go to a farmer's market in a neighboring town, a small farm in the southwest, with a tractor and cows, colorful nature next to a picturesque lake. Take your camera with you and travel all around to discover new horizons.

3. Look for photography inspiration online: Pinterest, Flickr, and Instagram

Choose the network that impresses you the best or register immediately everywhere, each of them is good in its own way. Subscribe to your favorite photographers on Instagram and see what inspires them and do not forget to post your favorite pictures. Pinterest allows you to create your own portfolio and motivation boards where you can organize and store your pins.

4. Start a blog

Share your pics and thoughts with others in a blog format, so you can get feedback from colleagues and ordinary users about your work, you will understand what exactly people like, and what can be done better. If you start to share your thoughts about this beautiful art, your vision, then perhaps this will inspire someone to become an artist too or allow to look at your illustration from another point of view.

5. Print your conceptual images

With the advent of digital photography, we all have many folders of interesting pictures that we just keep. Albums with printed photos give completely different emotions. It is nice to get them, look through, review and show to your friends and acquaintances. While you will choose which picture to print, you will have to look through all your works and even rethink some of them a little. Perhaps you will find an artistic idea for new poses, techniques, or maybe work on bugs and want to recapture old ones. It will be a good idea to print several of your best images in a month and get a beautiful album of works at the end of the year, which can be shown to friends and family.

6. Reassemble well-known work

Take a famous picture by a popular artist and try to reassemble it in elements. Think well what was used for creation. Make a list of tools and props and remake it by yourself. Use creative thinking to make its own vision of the subject. Practice imagination and avoid boring approaches.

7. Find a self photography inspiration with a selfie

Do not extend your hand now, turn on the front camera and press the button. Make a real self-portrait. Take a tripod, think overexposure, set light, set up camera correctly and experiment with the interior of a studio in all angles, poses, and props. Take a perfect portrait as you see yourself. Try to design yourself in a most impressive way. This will be a great experience as a model and will help you better understand your customers and find new guides.

8. Take care of education

If you have already graduated from an art school or completed several basic courses for beginners, using commercial websites, this is excellent, but there is no limit to perfection. Perhaps there is a complicated area where you still cannot be called a professional or you have little experience. This can be changed with the help of master classes or courses. Use YouTube channels of professional photographers and schools of photography, podcasts on this art, which forward information even during a morning run. This will make you remember important quotes and fashion trends.

9. Avoid boring work

It is normal to gain habits during the working process. Such routine actions become part of everyday life. And in case of bad mood and inspiration loss, these habits have to be changed. Think about position, angle, and style of shooting. Try to change some of your common tricks and props to leave the comfort zone. This will help to find new emotions and obtain useful experience.

10. Create your own project

If you work as a full-time photographer in a magazine, a photojournalist in a newspaper, photograph models in a studio, but always wanted to shoot landscapes or nature, do it. You can make your own project dedicated to the topic that you have been dreaming about for a long time. Take a day off and do what is really important and interesting for you. This will help you get distracted and with new strength and new experience return to your usual work. You should never block impulses, this can lead to burnout and destroy creative photography inspiration.

11. Go to a cinema

A new film or even a cartoon can also be a source of inspiration. Look how the composition is built, depth of field, what kind of lighting is used, pay attention to cropping. Some of these tricks will be useful in your future work. Imagine yourself in the place of director for this film and look at a screen with his eyes: what would you do differently, and what is just fine. Even a cartoon can become that Christmas present you expected for a long time. You won’t always find ideas for the right exposure, but you can sometimes read a wise quote or see a smart solution for composition and the concept.

12. Find a role model

Surely you have a favorite artist whose photos you examine and try to copy his or her style. Go to an exhibition of their works or buy their books, find out what exactly inspires them and where they get ideas for their pictures. Try to take some photos in the same style or recapture some of their works. So you will feel closer to your tutors. Of course, you should not completely immerse yourself in other people's ideas and thoughtlessly copy them, but you can extract something even from a logo.

13. Take part in a competition

For the contest you need pictures that express a certain idea or feeling, such tasks are useful for creativity. A jury will consider your work and give advice on what needs to be finalized and you will find out weaknesses to work on to become even better. The audience at every competition will give feedback and you will find out why people like your photos. It will be a new inspiring experience in your career.

14. Try something new

Surely you have a personal method to use most often: camera settings or camera angle or time when to take pictures, or maybe only shoot landscapes. Try a new genre, change camera settings, shutter speed, play with light and composition. This will be a new experience that will help in future work and allow us to switch to something new. Portrait photography inspiration may be outside the comfort zone, but it is worth to look for it.

15. Start taking shots of strangers

People can an endless source of inspiration, for all their similarities, they are so different, each of them is something special. Get off the subway in the center of a metropolis on Monday morning or go to a farmers market on a weekend. Shoot for a fashion week to take pictures of people and see how different the mood in these places will be. Each person has his own special story, his own charm. Each of them will be able to inspire a new project, shoot or submit a new idea for photos.

16. Choose a theme to express best

You can start filming your story: choose a subject, for example, take a picture of a park throughout the year. Take pictures at different times of a day and see how it changes from a foggy morning landscape and people who walk dogs to portraits of children with their parents, evening lights and night silence. It could be a whole story with a change of seasons, which later may become the theme of your own exhibition.

17. Read the most fascinating book in the world

It is the camera manual. Manual is a complex and very boring thing, but it will surprise you. Modern cameras have many interesting and useful settings and tools that we don’t even know about. Make it a rule to read one paragraph a day and immediately use new knowledge in practice and the result will surprise you. So you better know your camera and all its superpowers, which will help you shoot even better.

18. Carry a camera with you

You never know where exactly your best shot is waiting for you. It can be a portrait of a stranger in a subway, a stunning sunset against the backdrop of a city when you return home from work or an abstract picture of buildings in your area. Look at the world with wide eyes and be ready to take a picture at any time outdoors or indoors.

19. Try new equipment

There is a device that you wanted to buy for a long time, but you delay it. Do it now, do not wait another moment. It can be a new lens for shooting perfect bokeh or a new lighting device for diffused soft light, or even a new camera for underwater shooting to take stunning pictures of an ocean. If you are not yet ready to spend money on such a thing, then you can use equipment rental service and you can understand whether you really need such a device.

20. Get inspired by nature

The world around is so beautiful, it is constantly changing and you just need to open your eyes to see it. Stunning colors of summer in hot countries, snow-covered cities, autumn parks, painted in all colors of yellow and red, flowering spring gardens. Take a car, leave the city for a day in any direction and capture the beauty around.

If inspiration has left you for a while, do not get upset. You need to relax a bit, change the situation, gain strength and get back to work with new ideas.