How Photography Became an Escape During the Hardest Year

People are walking away from photography at the exact moment it could do the most for them. What looks like a hobby about pretty pictures can turn into something closer to therapy when life goes sideways.

That tension runs through a recent film from First Man Photography, where Adam Karnacz returns to the camera after a long absence with a story he needed to tell. He heads to an old quarry he's never shot before, a spot nature has reclaimed, with a waterfall, a lone birch tree, and rock walls that open up out of nowhere. The car park was full, but everyone else went up the mountains, leaving him the whole scene to himself. 

For the main waterfall shot, Karnacz faces a real problem. Wind is chopping the water into a mess of contrast, reflections, and ripples that pull attention away from the falls behind him. His fix is a long exposure with a 10-stop filter on the front, shooting at ISO 400 and f/8 with a middle exposure around two and a half seconds, then bracketing two stops either side. The goal is to smooth the water into something calm so the eye goes straight to the waterfall and the light coming through the leaves. He offsets the falls rather than centering them, arguing that a little imbalance gives the frame more mood and more sense of place. Later, at sunset, he uses the thumb technique to tame lens flare, blocking the sun with his thumb for a second frame he can blend in during editing.

There's a real principle underneath the emotion here, and it connects to a wider shift in how people talk about creative hobbies. Landscape photography stacks several things that psychologists tie to recovery from stress: focused attention on a creative task, time in nature, physical exercise from the walk in, and a finished object you can take home, edit, and print. Time in green spaces has been linked to lower stress in study after study, and the act of framing a shot forces the kind of present-moment focus that quiets a busy mind. Karnacz isn't prescribing this as a cure, and grief doesn't work on a schedule. As a way to get out of your own head for an afternoon, though, few hobbies pack as much into a single walk. If you've drifted from your camera during a rough stretch, this is a strong argument for picking it back up, and it fits anyone who responds better to doing than to sitting still.

Watch the full film above to see how the quarry shots turned out and to hear Karnacz tell his father's story in his own words.