Tag: blipfoto

In this month of excess…

don’t forget to check in with yourself…and get committed!

20151129-DSC_5767-Edit-2

If you deny yourself commitment, what can you do with your life?

Harvey Fierstein

December is my month for reflection; to think back on the year and to consider the next. It is also a month of excess and pressure that flies along at such a pace that if we aren’t careful, we can be left feeling depressed, out of sorts, and like we have missed something.

For me it is a time to set goals and to put those things into play before the end of the year so that when the first of January rolls around I already have a head start. Such has been the case with my first year of blogging.

My goal was to post a weekly post and on that first day as I sat down in front of my blank screen I began to wonder just what I had gotten myself into. Like most other things though if you commit to it, it has a way of finding its own path. For me, because I see my world in images first that seemed to be a natural starting point…the image. Once I had that in place, each week seemed to just write itself.

This has been the second of such challenges that I have set for myself and both times the rewards have been unexpected and far more than I had hoped for. The first of these challenges was to post an image every day with the requirement that the image had to be taken on that very day. I was introduced to this site that had its start in Scotland by a dear South African friend, an immensely talented photographer and painter whom I had met many years ago while spending time in Africa. I posted for two straight years and not only learned far more about the art of photography but I learned about myself and how I see the world around me.

A more in-depth look at some of my images took this further yet and now as I sit ready to hit the publish button on my 51st post, I feel a sense of confidence and even more importantly self that I earned by making a commitment to myself and my art.

So what are you waiting for? There’s no better time to get off of the sofa and follow a dream!

How to jump start your creativity…

double exposure on Morton Slough, Idaho
“late afternoon light and a double exposure on Morton Slough, Idaho”

I have a vision of life, and I try to find equivalents for it in the form of photographs.
Alfred Stieglitz

I am often asked how I stay so creative and where do my ideas come from. The best answer I have would be that I make feeding my creativity a daily habit. I have always been one to have my camera with me at all times but in the past perhaps did not use it every single day. That all changed 600 days ago when a friend of mine suggested that I join blipfoto, a daily journal for photographers, where an image is posted each day and must have been taken on that day. I found the prospect of doing a 365 day project appealing and began posting an image of my world every day. This was not without its own set of challenges and some days, perhaps more so initially, it felt like one more task that I had to get done for the day. In time though it developed a rhythm of its own and I noticed some changes taking place in how I was photographing.
With the advent of digital photography we were all of a sudden able to take hundreds of images and just discard the ones we didn’t like. Why not? There was no film involved and no cost for developing. I took it one more step backwards and with the purchase of my first DSLR realized that I wasn’t doing what I had always done with a film camera which was to shoot it in manual mode and make my own decisions on shutter speed, aperture etc. If you want to be more creative, take your camera off the auto setting and although it may be frustrating at first, you’ll soon wonder why you ever let the camera make decisions for you!
Using my camera every day made me develop a relationship with it again and that in turn fueled the desire to be able to capture images that were more meaningful to me. The volume of photographs that I take has dropped drastically from those early days of digital. I edit those captures every day so I try to make each shot count and get it right, in camera, as often as possible. This lessens the work load too while in the digital darkroom!
So, if you want to jump start your creativity you need to feed it every day. For me, photography is a meditative process and it is when I am in that zone that the magic begins and one idea feeds into the next, and the next, and the next…