Experiments in Light

Sometimes, just like other creative artists, we photographers can find ourselves in a rut, tired of taking the same old stale shots and feeling uninspired.

What to do in such a situation?

I’m reminded of a friend of mine who, two years ago, said to me, “Why do you only take pictures when you’re on holiday? Why don’t you document your everyday life too and look at your surroundings from a fresh point of view – there’s always new things to find if you take the trouble to look.”

She had no technical knowledge of photography and had only a simple point-and-shoot camera, but she was always doing creative and imaginative things that produced unusual and striking images.

Her advice totally transformed the way I take pictures, and stopped the pursuit from getting stale.

So, let’s look at a few specific ideas on what to do when your creative flame has gone out and there’s no trip to an exotic location on the cards:

• Walk around your town imagining yourself as a tourist seeing it for the first time.

• Take a train or bus out to a suburb you don’t know and wander around at random.

• Try a style of photography you haven’t tried before. Go to a junk yard and and do abstract. Try ‘light painting,’ panning, night street photography, use an intervalometer or do anything you don’t normally do. Force yourself.

• Buy some coffee-table books of great photos or look at quality images online and try to emulate your favourites – challenge yourself to work out how they did it.

• Break the rules – ditch all that constraining baggage and experiment! Try shooting from strange angles. For example, put the camera on the ground. Use inappropriate white balance to artistic effect. Position items unusually in the frame. Deliberately blur things or underexpose to create mood. Crank up the ISO to make atmospheric grainy black and white images.

• Take pictures at a different time. If you usually shoot in the afternoon and evening, try it early in the morning, and vice versa.

• Learn new post-processing techniques. Go wild with your software – play with curves and filters with reckless abandon to create new bold art.

• If you have some cash, buy new gear, which can act as a catalyst to creativity, even though we are often told that the gear is unimportant.

• Start a project – a themed or constrained framework to force you into action. Start a ‘photo-a-day’ blog like this one, or take a series of pictures at regular intervals in the same place, documenting change. Photograph nothing but postboxes, street signs, drainage covers, food, bicycles or silhouettes for a month.

• Try extreme macro and transform your home and its contents into a treasure trove of abstract shapes, patterns and textures.

• Stop taking clichéd shots of dogs, children, birds and flowers. Or, if you never do that normally, start doing it!

• Enroll in a photography class.

• Walk around taking random shots from the hip without framing – you may be surprised at what you come up with by chance.

• Draw up a list of different photographic styles and subjects and assign each a number. Roll dice and make that your assignment for the week. Stick to it rigidly.

• If any of the above fail to inspire you, start a new hobby which is so unspeakably dull, you return to photography with a vengeance. 

I hope some of these ideas serve to reignite your passion if you’ve been losing it.

Feel free to add anything else you can think of…

Read Full Post »