THIS WEEK'S PROJECT: Setting limits to release creativity
Starting a piece of writing with a blank piece of paper, food shopping with no meal plan, garden design with no brief: all recipes for a long, tortuous, wasteful process to a single final (probably
dissapointing) outcome.
It's the same when you're about to take a photograph.
If you have a day set aside, but no goal, no definite idea of what you want to achieve, then more likely than not you'll try a bit of this, a bit of that, and finish up generally dissatisfied with everything.
But if you impose some artificial limits, your brain will respond like magic. Give the writer a list of objects they need to include, or a story arc, or an opening sentence, and they'll be off. Tell me I need 3 meals to be slow cooked, 2 packed lunches and a roast, and I'll be finished shopping in
20 minutes. And let the garden designer know you have acid soil, you need a cutting garden and a wild flower area, and they've got somewhere to start.
As for the writer, the chef, the gardener, so for you. I'm going to give you a few artificial constraints to try this week. You can try one or all of them. No cheating. You will run out of ideas at some point but you must keep going, keep taking photos, even though they are not going to be your best work. The process of finding images will train the neurons in your brain that this is what you want it to do when you next start looking for images, and so then next time it will be easier. (I have a psychology degree. This is true, I'm not making it up.)
Pick one of these:
1. A time restriction: you must take a photograph every 5 minutes for an hour. Set an alarm, and you can spend no longer than 3 seconds looking for the image.
2. A subject restriction: pick one thing (a chair, a toy, a vegetable, not a person) and take 20 completely different portraits of it.
3. A kit restriction: what's the piece of kit you use least? Take it out and create 20 photos with it.
So what about the camera controls?
It's up to you how you want to do this section of the course. If you are constantly trying to remember apertures, or change shutter speeds, it will inhibit your creative brain. But you are also on a journey to learn to use your camera, so you might not want to completely forget everything you've learnt so far.
By all means, use your phone for these exercises, or stick your camera on Program, and have some fun. You can't be creative if you are worried.
But if you're up for it, you can take 5 or 10 minutes before the exercise to practise one (only one) manual control, and then use that one as you work through the exercise. For example, if you want to incorporate shallow depth of field, do some test shots with your camera on a large aperture first. Make sure you have enough light, and that all the other controls are working OK. Then leave your camera on that setting and forget it. Don't be tempted to change it during the exercise.
(If you have the first workbook, there are more ideas to try in Chapter 15.)
|