factors affecting creativity and output

[RML]

And stress from work or family life is detrimental to my photographic creativity and production.

Mainly stress from work is killing my shooting appetite. Family life just gets in the way but we're all learning ot live with my shooting. 🙂

 

[OdDbaLL]

Well it goes without saying that you never have a camera when the most amazing opportunities arise. I almost always carry a camera. And the times I go out without one I know there will be something great to shoot. It's always a very painful moment, those times when I walk out the door naked.

As for creativity.. I retreat into my cave and find my Power Animal.... sorry 😀

Travelling naturally makes me shoot more, something wrong with you otherwise I think. Just a desire to record something, creating something that can then take you back to that moment. I take pictures all the time, wether there are people around or not. I am usually not overly concious of the process. If I see something I want to remember I take it's picture. I've never conciously gone hunting for a photograph. Studio photography does not interest me either. I take it all is it comes.

 

[Toby]

I've taken to keeping a notebook of ideas recently -if I know I'm going to a shoot I rough out the type of shots I'd like or even some ideas about what I think about or my opinions on a set theme -found it really helps me to have some ideas prepared

 

[Honu-Hugger]

With myself I recognize an inverse relationship between gear and output; less is more. I seriously intend to dump some gear, but always the question of what goes and what stays.

 

[Pherdinand]

honu, you mean you will sell off your contax gear /
lol, i should not ask this, i am not interested anymore [i guess]

 

[brightsky]

Very introspective thread. I read this yesterday and had to think about it for a while before responding.

At one time, looking at photographers websites, forum galleries, and reading various photography books served only to depress me because I do not live in a beautiful scenic place nor an urban jungle where opportunities abound.

Gradually, it dawned on me that I was using it as an excuse and there were moments or fragments of the whole that presented good opportunities if I taught myself to look for those slices as such, instead of waiting for the entirety.

Some days my senses are like nerve endings, sensitive to the most minute stimulation and I "see," somedays I do not. I must feel a sense of timelessness to be aware.

Rushing due to time constraints usually results in nothing. There is always some stress present and learning to divorce it is an art. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I do not.

Photography requires mental discipline. I think, for me, that developing the discipline to visualize microcosms will improve my photography.

 

[JohnL]

Tend to be more productive if I have a plan ... i.e. if I have a rough idea of what I'm going to do. In photography too.
Tend to be less productive spending too much time on RFF, but surely someone already said that ...

 

[jan normandale]

Tend to be more productive if I have a plan ... i.e. if I have a rough idea of what I'm going to do. In photography too.
Tend to be less productive spending too much time on RFF, but surely someone already said that ...

I'll confirm that observation. Many times I will be sitting at the screen rather than doing what I should be doing. Getting out when the opportunity presents itself can end up in conflict with the RFF website postings and galleries.

 

[Bertram2]

I have noticed these tendencies in myself over the years:

When I"m waiting to receive a new piece of gear in the mail, I take fewer pictures with the gear that I already have than I did before purchasing the new piece.

And when I consume alcohol, my creativity is numbed and I become uninspired to take pictures even when I see something interesting.

And when I smoked (years ago) non-tobacco cigarettes, I thought everything was interesting and would take copious amounts of pictures, only to find out later, once they were developed, that there really was nothing interesting.

And stress from work or family life is detrimental to my photographic creativity and production.

Anyone else care to add?

You will hate it : When you have been too long at RFF !!! 😀 😀 😀

Serious: Dealing too much with gear ideas, talking about philosophical, sexual, medical and economical probs with people you don't know a bit, watching too many photos others have shot means you got much too virtual . 🙂

Just turn of your PC as you were off for holidays and think about yourself and why you keep yourself beeing a photographer and what for you is "soul" enuff to get photographed .

Good luck ! :angel:

bertram

 

[Bertram2]

Y
Just turn of your PC as you were off for holidays and think about yourself and why you keep yourself beeing a photographer and what for you is "soul" enuff to get photographed .

Good luck ! :angel:

bertram

Ahh , I forgot. There is no need to stop drinking. Alcohol does not affect creativity,
that's a fairytale of some dried out churchy types who have no oil in their lamps, if you no what i mean . Bukowsky proved it !! 😀 😀 😀

Bertram

 

[dostacos]

SNIP. When I go out I know exactly what I am wanting to shoot. I may not get the shot the way I want though, so sometimes I have to revisit the site and try again. Hopefully the ability to get the shot is still there. Some shot may not be available again for a year or more. That is okay , I wait.

I agree on returning to the "scene of the crime" I have some ideas that happen once a day at the most, many times on partially what I want. [my goal is to get all of the Newport dory fleet on the beach at the same time.] sometime between 6am and 7am, surf needs to be low and the catch good. oh did I mention that this is about 35 miles from home 😱

To me this is being creative and not just a "recorder" of images, that is a P&S . I also find myself looking more and more for photo ops and less and less letting life just slide on by.

We may not always create the scene as in a studio, however we do manipulate the environment [or at least wait for the mood we want] and using DOF, lighting our goal is to create a picture to gain some type of reaction from the viewer.

 

[einolu]

I used to worry, but recently I have started taking a camera out and shooting. Sometimes I dont take too many pictures, sometimes I fly through a roll taking pictures of the pavement. I stopped caring about what I should be doing and have been on a pretty good photographic roll. Im going to try and keep the momentum going (thought who knows if I will be able to).

My photography is effected by my mood, which is effected by how my life is going (school, social, money). But sometimes I can go beyond moods when I look through the viewfinder. I simply take pictures, though maybe what I actually take pictures of is effected by my mood, the way I take those pictures is governed by something outside the realm of 'mood'. Wonder if that makes sense...

Output is pretty irrelevent to me (except when it isnt), sometimes I dont develop rolls for weeks (though recently I have been). I sometimes feel happy walking around without a camera, and seeing interesting things happened. I see them in a different way, but I keep the moment in the back of my head. A moment to look out for in the future. I dont really know what a good pictures is either, to me, pictures are just interesting. I have seen enough perfect pictures of insects and models and other such things. I want to capture something different (but I fail all to often).

What a silly response 😛.

 

[Rodinal Addict]

What do we really create, anyway? I guess we create an image of something real that we've seen. The value of this image is how memorable, interesting and real it is to the shooter and the audience.
Jerry Winogrand once said,(something like), " I just wanted to see what this thing looked like photographed". All we can do is show others and ourselves what our world looks like photographed.
I'm in my second semester of photography classes at a local junior college. I work (at a "real" job) all day, and take classes at night. My main purpose here is to get an "assignment". It forces me to photograph things I normally wouldn't be interested in, using techniques, equipment, and processes I don't currently use. It is teaching me not more "creativity", ( whatever that is), but to present images of things in my world in a way that myself and hopefully others admire and remember.

 

[James Burton]

Ever noticed how when you sell a camera, you first have to quickly shoot out the roll of film that's in it, taking pics of anything, and it usually has some keepers on it?

I think you're onto something here Gene. I used to always finish a roll on the dog (before doggy ran awwf). Were always some keepers there. In high school I had a thing I would do where I used to shot almost randomly. I figured that if I couldn't actively think of anything to shoot I could experiment and maybe find something that worked a little. I still do this sometimes although in a very controlled fashion.

When I get more 'serious', I find I have fewer keepers, and I feel less inclined to get started.
So I try to toss out 'seriousness' and 'intent' and just react to things I see.

I went through a period 6 months ago when I finally started to have room in my head to think in terms of compositions. i.e. I fingured out how to combine shape, light, action. After a few shoots it disappeared dammit. It sometimes reappears but never when I try to do it deliberately.

I think you need to keep a balance, between conciously doing the right thing and just letting it happen. Between choosing to be in the right place and seeing what was going to be there anyway. Between being 'serious' and being 'zen'. between allowing yourself to shoot pictures of young women and telling yourself that its boring going through thousands of those pictures on the contact sheets.

I want ot be able to control being in the zone, but all I can do is to encourage it to happen.

James

 

[James Burton]

I think we acquire an egotistical burden if we apply the word "creative" to ourselves: paradoxically, I believe the word itself is totally empty, meaningless.

Although I agree that the burden can be there I think it is placed there by the observer. i.e. you. Creativity (the word) describes a simple mechanical process of making a non-deliberated choice. i.e. you chose option 2, not because its better than 1 but because - well you don't know why.

My current thinking is that this is directly related to language in the brain. If you reduce language to grammar you can analyse and reconstruct sentences, you can watch a person learn the rules of the grammar. But none of that tells a human how to express their feelings. There is no set of rules to reduce what needs to be expressed (a survival imperative) into the relevant grammatical constructs which can then become language. What we do have is a good memory mechanism and the ability to pick out pieces of relevant experience which give us choices fo things we know to work. i.e. we remember a bunch of sentences which express the right thing that we have heard before. We only need to choose exactly the corect one.

When this mechanism is applied to non-language it looks strange. e.g. this portion of the music represents the sadness our hero is experiencing at this time. Huh?

I don't really think you can satisfactorily vocalise what a photograph is expressing but I do believe that the creativity mechanism is used quite a lot in the construction of an image - whatever the process involved.

James

 

[Hlynur]

The darkness at this time of the year is making it really difficult for me to shot as much as would like. I live in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Now the daylight is about 6 hours (9am - 3pm) and the days are getting shorter until 21./22. of Desember when the days start slowly to get longer again. It will be dark like now until the end of january I think....and still dark through february. So now it's dark when I go to work (at 8-9am) and dark when I get home around 5pm. If I have time I try to catch some daylight hours at weekends for photography.

Fortunately I don't have to suffer through all this dark period this winter, because I'm going to spend almost all of next january (4 weeks) in Rio de Janeiro with my brazilian girlfriend!