Advice sought - Photographer's Block

[Al Kaplan]

What I've been trying to do is shoot more of the boring everyday things, places I go all the time, people I see all the time. They don't seem important until they're not there anymore and you wish you'd gotten a photograph when you still could.

Across the street from the North Miami Chamber of Commerce is a little strip shopping center. There used to be a ramshackle wooden building there that was a bar. It never occured to me to photograph the place. It didn't look like anything. A few years after it had been torn down I found out that the girl who'd been the barmaid there ended up starring in a famous film called Deep Throat. The summer they were filming it a good friend of mine was renting her house, but I didn't take any photos there either, nor of her dog that he was babysitting for the summer. We didn't know about thefilm then. I have no photos of the Vagabond Motel where they filmed it either. It's still there, but it's been remodeled, the sign is gone, and it's now used as a dorm for Johnson and Wales University. I'd ignored the whole back story of Linda Lovelace and Deep Throat because it looked like a bunch of assorted run down buildings and a mangey red dog.

Shoot everything, keep everything, because you never know...

 

[bmattock]

Bmattock:

On page 8 of My Photos I have an inside Dot's Diner shot taken with a IIIf. Dot's Diner is, of course, in Shady Dell Trailer Park. It's three blocks from my house!

Cool! Hope you have fun at the chocolate tasting, too!

 

[st3ph3nm]

When I've had trouble thinking of things to do, I've found that entering one of the projects, here, is good - or even one of the W/NW threads. Get given a topic, force yourself to shoot to that theme, and away you go. It's got me going a couple of times, and forced me to try things I'd not done before.

Cheers,
Steve

 

[tedwhite]

When I was first starting out in photography I ran into a dry spell. Couldn't think of a thing to photograph. I had recently been to a garbage dump and, for no reason that I can recall, I had picked up and put into a box various smallish bottles of different colors, thinking perhaps that they might be worth something. They weren't.

So I broke them up into small pieces, put them on a table covered with black cloth, and experimented with a macro lens, finally ending up with two abstract photos of deep colors interacting with one another. Made a couple of 16X20's (actually a lab made them) and hung them up. People would scratch their heads trying to figure out what they were looking at. "How did you do that, and what is it?" some would ask.

Anyway, it's sometimes surprising what one can accidentally come up with, sort of like thinking outside the box (to use an overworn expression).

 

[sepiareverb]

Sounds like it's time to hole up in the darkroom and print. After printing for a while you'll be itching to get back out there.

 

[FallisPhoto]

What do you do when you hit a creative wall?

A number of things.
1. Step way, way, way out of the box and try to do something really weird (at least for you).
2. Concentrate on a different aspect or type of photography that you have been ignoring.
3. Analyze your photos, decide which ones you don't really like, figure out how they could be improved and reshoot the ones you can.
4. Go on a trip and look for something different to shoot.

The important thing is to not stop shooting. Work through it and your block will come to an end. If you stop shooting and just wait for inspiration to come, it never will.

 

[crawdiddy]

Call Dick Cheney for ideas ... I heard he's out of a job! :angel:

Very funny, my friend from the extreme South.

Dick Cheney is likely to tell you to go and shoot an Austin attorney in the face. And then later, in a bizarre turn of events, that attorney would apologize to YOU.

 

[ebolton]

I usually have a long term 'project' going on, and one 'on-deck' . Usually, once I think of and start working on a project, the next one occurs to me, and off-topic occasional things that result in better images anyway seem to present themselves.

Right now, I'm shooting the Matchbox cars from my youth, recently rediscovered after thinking they were gone. After I started that, I realized I go by what seems to me to be an inordinate number of churches on my commute, so that is on deck. After the Matchboxes, if I'm still working by then, I'm going to shoot all those churches. That's my on-deck project.

 

[Chris101]

... And I see you're in Bisbee, AZ, right? I used to live in Chicago, listened to WLS and the Nation of Marvin took a road trip one year to Shady Dells RV Park.

http://www.theshadydell.com/

...

You'd love it Bill. The last time I was there (November) I stayed in the El Rey: