Be Creative and Follow Your Passion
Being creative and following your own passion is one of the best things you can do in life. There is nothing worse than doing a job that you hate and not following your dreams. Once you get into a creative mindset everything you see around you starts to become a creative tool. I quite often have moments where there is not a lot of creativity going on and I have to maintain my house and do what is required for the family. I find that I have to try really hard to keep creative.
The NZIPP Iris Awards for Creativity
Every year I enter into the Iris Awards which makes me think extremely creatively. I have been to the Iris awards once in Wellington and heard one of the judges, who I know, say that he was incredibly bored with the in-camera portrait category. “I’ve seen it all before,” he said. He was getting a coffee and sighing. I could see his frustration at the lack of creative entries. The next year I decided to go very creative with my entries even if they weren’t quite perfect, but I wasn’t sure if they would actually do any good. I ended up being a finalist in the category which really surprised me at the time!
My tips for being extra creative.
1. Get a Personal Project.
Whether it’s taking photos of something you love, aiming to open an exhibition or entering some awards, or produce ten artworks, a personal project is a fantastic way to make yourself be creative.
It’s good to have a deadline for your personal project otherwise you may never complete it. Having a deadline makes you challenge yourself and go out and do the work daily or weekly. It’s good to narrow yourself down to a very specific theme and try and work around that theme but don’t restrict yourself too much.
Sometimes other projects come out of the project you are currently doing. Try to keep on track but write the other ideas down for the following year. You may find you will start eating, sleeping and dreaming your personal project every day and figuring out how it’s going to work. For example, when I didn’t exhibition I decided to do nature photography, so everything I saw in the garden or when walking at the park became a subject. I had to think how I was going to use the subject in a more creative way to produce and artwork. It made me organise extra picnics and trips out in order to get the photos.
You start waking up in the morning having brainwaves about what you are going to shoot and how you are going to edit it. Also, you will start to see things when you are out on a shoot that you wouldn’t usually see. You start to think differently.
2. Spend time in nature with your camera.
Actually spend time in nature without your camera as well. Nature is the most complex, most creative place you can be. It appears to be simple, but underneath the complexity is enormous. It’s relaxing, it’s beautiful and everybody can relate to it. As humans we are meant to be in nature and many of us have lost this, as we now live largely indoors.
It’s a good idea to go camping or on picnics at the beach or in the forest, and you start to see things and imagine things. Even just going into your own garden can be extremely inspiring. Pick some flowers and look at them closely. Take photos of the flowers. Put the flowers with different backgrounds. Change the lighting. Do weird things to them and you will get artwork.
Don’t forget things like geology such as stones and rocks and cliff faces and hills and anything interesting to do with rocks you can get different textures and colours and all sorts of interesting things going on in your photos.
Use bodies of water and natural occurring landscapes. Inspiration comes from nature.
3. Go out on a bright bright sunny day and shoot shadows and light.
Look for architecture casting geometric shadows. Put a subject in the middle of the light and shadow. See what effect you get. If you don’t have a portrait subject just shoot the shadows and light. You can do this in the city or even at your own house with a glass, a rock, whatever you want.
Check out a table with slots on it which cast shadows and light, or some Venetian blinds that you have at home. You can also do this with nature. Ferns often have a very symmetrical shadow pattern. Or you may want to go completely random with leaves casting shadows on a bright face. Working with light and shadow makes you think more creatively. We are often told not to shoot in the sun. Just try things that you were told not to do. See what happens?
And don’t just think in black and white and light and dark – add colour too, like this image below shot in full sunlight with shadows on one side of the face.
4. Use the in-camera functions on your camera.
Try double exposures, slow shutter speeds, ND filters. Overexpose, underexpose, just do whatever you want. Don’t follow the rules that you have learnt in a class. Have black blacks and blown out highlights. Just try it.
5. Have no expectations on what artwork you are going to make.
The more you try and make an artwork the more trouble you sometimes have. Sometimes it’s best just to go out and shoot and see what you get. Most artworks are happy mistakes because you have fiddled around and done something you don’t normally do. I’ve even seen amazing art works when someone’s tripod fell over in a gust of wind creating the best landscape they got that day.
Also don’t be afraid to go and reshoot. Once I took some photos of mushrooms from the side and two photos of the tops of round mushrooms. In bed that night I had an idea that I needed to shoot more mushrooms from the top, so I had to go back the next day and reshoot. The result was a stunning artwork which won an award.
6. Embrace the randomness of creativity.
Creativity has a lot of randomness with it. Sometimes if you are too structured you miss the creativity. This is mainly because creativity can take you in strange chaotic directions. You have to embrace the randomness and go where it takes you, like travelling down a river on a raft. You don’t know what rocks you are going to hit which direction you’re gonna go, so you have to go with it.
You may go out with the intention to shoot colour close up portraits and end up with a stunning silhouette image instead. You may see the image in colour and decide to edit in black and white. Things will present themselves to you when you are taking photos either in the studio or outdoors. Unpredictable things will happen with models, the weather and props. Then you have the decisions to make when editing which changes your image yet again. There are hundreds and thousands of possibilities at your fingertips.
7. Look at basic objects with new fresh eyes.
If you need a hand with this, take a child with you. A seven to ten-year-old child is a good bundle of creativity to take on a shoot with you. They think outside the box. Get them well involved in the shoot. Ask them questions and you will get creative answers. Basic objects become light sabres or aeroplanes. A child will see a reflection in the window or in water and point it out to you. If they have their own camera, they will shoot at different angles to you. This is usually from down low below the adult point of view. A child would probably even climb a tree and shoot from up above looking down. They won’t worry about the gear or what might happen to it. They will just say, “What if you shot from the roof?” You have to start thinking like a child also as they are not limited by practicalities which can hinder creativity. They don’t know the rules of photography so are constantly breaking them, and this often creates art.
8. Don’t follow other photographers too much.
It’s good to see what is happening out in the world of photography but please don’t follow other photographers down to the last minute detail. I have read blogs about creativity increasing in people who watch other people’s work. I agree with this. If I go to the art gallery and see a painter, I get ideas for photos. Not exactly like the painting but it might be they have overlaid something on a face and now I want to try it with some photography, but in a different way. It’s called inspiration, not copying.
It gets harder when you look at other people in your same field. If it’s photography you may want to exactly copy the lighting. That might be okay, but be aware that you should try to have everything else different in the photo. Or you might want to emulate some costuming but make sure the lighting is different and the backdrop. Don’t use the same posing try a different pose. Even the old masters copied each other but most of the time they had their own style of painting and own way of doing things.
If you were taught by someone else, that’s great, but try different things to what your teacher has taught you. Find your own style. Use their teachings to help with technique and story telling – but find a style that is different. It might be different editing, or different lighting set ups.
The one thing I see at the moment is a lot of clones of famous online photography classes. In some ways this is ok – it’s a learning process. Artists often start their career by emulating others, but to really stand apart from the throng of clones, you need to get the confidence to step out of what you’ve been taught and try new and weird things. That’s called finding your own style and creativity. And it is so mind-blowingly satisfying to get to this point!
9. Travel.
You may not be a travel photographer, but travel can make you think more creatively in your portrait work. It maybe that you find a new location or you see a plant that inspires you. You may visit a gallery that you’ve never been to, or you may see a craft person in a market. Travel helps you learn and experience new things. Travelling to another country helps you learn about new and different cultures and ways of seeing things. When you go home you may have been inspired by some beautiful fabric you saw and start shooting photos using fabric as the inspiration, but in a different way, so that it’s your own.
10. Don’t think too hard.
Your logical brain will tell you you have to shoot in a certain way, but at the end of the day creativity means shooting in a different way to the crowds of photographers out there. Everything has been done before. Don’t worry about it. Just go out and do random stuff. Do the weirdest composition you can think of, even if you don’t think it will work. Some of your random creativity will work and some of it will not work, but that’s okay. It’s really about pushing the boundaries and challenging yourself to make more art and improve your art.
Go out and have some fun now and be creative. I believe that you can learn to be creative even if you think you are not a creative person. Don’t be a clone – be original!