Photography is comprised of hard skills like learning how your camera works, all that technical stuff that I love, and creative skills that can be harder to learn. Left brain, right brain, everyone has a mix that makes up their photographic identity. When you master your camera functions, and start to really get in touch with your creative vision, that is when magic occurs behind the camera. You start creating memorable images that define your year or even your career. We get a lot of questions about improving creativity, so I thought I would do a series of blog posts on concepts we teach during our workshops.
Creativity has many aspects, but the one many photographers first focus on is originality. We want to photograph a location no one else has been to, or create an image no one has seen. Originality motivates you to find a new perspective, and is easily identifiable as ‘creative’ since no one else has seen it or photographed it. Take a look at the dune image above. This shot was done in White Sands NP a few years ago. We were teaching a workshop in Bosque Del Apache, and everyone we talked to said white sands was totally tracked out, conditions were terrible, ‘don’t even take your group there…’. I’ve learned through a career of shooting assignments that anytime someone tells you conditions are terrible or it won’t work, that motivates me even more. So on this trip to white sands we walked further into the desert looking for original scenes, and found this beautiful juxtaposition of dunes and pink twilight sky. In terms of originality, thousands of photographers go to White Sands every year, so the location isn’t ‘original’. But a hundred yards off the road I found an original image I had never seen before. And with shifting sand dunes in the wind, this scene is probably gone forever. So a big takeaway here is even if you go to a popular location or park, there are plenty of original images to create. Iconic well documented scenes are not bad, they motivate us to visit a location, and inspire us to create more. Your image of the Grand Canyon from Mather Point overlook may not be original, but it is important in your creative progression to deeper, more meaningful (i.e. creative) images.
While ‘originality’ might be the most recognized benchmark of creativity, there is much more that makes up your creativity and vision. Take a look at this image above. I took this image over 30 years ago, and it changed my career. At the time Cree and I were living in a small cabin in Alaska about an hour away from this glacier. We spent many days on the glacier ice climbing and hiking around. One day we came upon this deep blue pool in the bottom of a crevasse. The pool had formed with glacial runoff water, and any day the glacier could move and drain the pool. That night at home I couldn’t stop thinking about that pool. I had taken some landscape images with the pool, but I just thought it was missing something. Using my imagination, I tried to visualize something crazy and different…and an idea formed. Why not have someone floating in a raft in the pool, creating a comical ‘summertime in Alaska’ image? Cree was up for the challenge, so we bought a cheap inflatable raft, hiked up the glacier, and rappelled down into the crevasse. Cree jumped on the raft after shedding her crampons and climbing harness. I climbed back up and took the image. I submitted the image to magazine editors, and everyone loved it. National Geographic used the shot, and the editors at NGS called my work ‘visionary’. My career took off after that. The important part driving my creativity for this image wasn’t originality (although it was at the time), but instead it was imagination. I spent hours dreaming up some crazy image that might resonate with a large audience. Imagination fosters creativity, and leads you down new paths in your photography. I often think my imagination is the most important aspect of my photo career…being able to visualize in images a client’s needs.
So there are the first two principles of creativity, originality and imagination. But there is much more that helps you be creative. I’ll save those for the next blog blog post coming out soon! Happy shooting!