What is creative photography?
Photography is just one way for people to express their creativity. Some people cook without a recipe, others paint what they see in their head. Photographers use their camera to create an image, express a feeling, show their style.
Are you creative?
You might think you are not creative because you can’t draw or you can’t sing. Not true. Everyone is creative. Creativity is part of being human. The need to move beyond the status quo, to be curious, to follow a train of thought, to see what happens if we put this with that, to express an emotion with brush or pen or camera – this is what makes us different from computers.
What is a creative photograph?
If you thought about what you wanted to do before you pressed the shutter, that’s a creative photograph. It doesn’t have to be a water splash or a shot taken through a lens ball. These images are often confused with creative photography. They are unusual or different, but they are not the sum total of creative photography. Any photograph that has come from inside your head and made it out into the world is creative.
(If you want to try water splash photography this is a good post, and this one for lens balls.)
Creativity is simply the ability to make something from nothing. It’s the ability to start with only your thoughts and then let them out into the world in whatever form you want – it could be painting or photography, cooking or coding.
Your creative photograph doesn’t have to be unique. It doesn’t matter if someone else has done it before or done it better. Your creativity is personal to you. If you take a photograph that was inspired by a thought or a result of trying something or simply because you turned up and were drawn to a patch of light: that is creative photography.
Learning to be creative
You don’t need to learn to be creative, you just need to uncover the creativity that’s waiting inside you. When you were five years old you would have drawn, sung and sculpted with no inhibitions because you didn’t know you could do it “wrong”. As adults, especially in the photography world, we fear breaking some unwritten rule, being judged for being a beginner or being laughed at for trying something different.
To find your voice and your creativity you need to move beyond these fears, be willing to try and fail, and acknowledge you won’t get it right first time.
What do you need to do to allow your five year old to find their voice again?
Becoming a creative again
Emma (who has a Master’s degree in Psychology specialising in teaching creativity) has written a do-at-home course for photographers wanting to uncover their creativity, available on Amazon, called “A Creativity Workbook for Photographers”. To get started try these exercises which are taken from the book:
Take five or ten minutes now and draw these eight items – four are common items and four are made-up items:
a bird, a house, a tree, a bicycle, a zagger, a mumflump, a smeefly,a tractoid
How did you find it? Was it easier drawing the made-up things? Did you have fewer inhibitions when there were no expectations of creating a life-like drawing?
Pay attention to how you talk to yourself. If you hear yourself thinking along these lines:
“I'm not creative.”
"I never have good ideas.”
"This is pointless.”
"This is taking too long.”
then just rephrase the thoughts and tell yourself:
"The ideas are in there just waiting to come out.”
"I trust myself.”
"This is fun – who knows what might happen.”
"I have a lot of creative energy.”
Become more “open”. Wenfu Li (a professor of psychology in the USA) has demonstrated that being willing to encounter new situations or information – basically being curious about things – is one of the main predictors of a higher degree of creativity in an individual. And the good news for us all is that this "openness to new experiences" is not a character trait you have to be born with. We can all actively get out of our comfort zones, try new things, go to different places and meet new people.
Schedule it into your week: make time to read something different, listen to a new podcast, watch somebody unusual on YouTube or explore a type of art you haven’t previously been drawn to.
Make a start. It’s easy to read about photography and creativity, it’s much harder to actually put into practice what you’ve read.
If you need help learning the basics of camera control before you jump into intuitive, creative photography, join Emma’s online beginner’s course A Year With My Camera which is free by email:
