I’ve been at home sick for the last few days and it has me thinking a lot about the creative ruts I get into. The ones that have me feeling like there’s nothing interesting to photograph around me and all the creativity has been drained from my body. Okay, maybe the medication I’m on has me feeling a bit dramatic but I think you get my point. As I thought about this more and more, I eventually came up with 3 things that I do consistently to spark my creativity to get out of these ruts.
1. Turning to Others
In his eBook, The Inspired Eye, David duChemin talks about increasing your inputs. The idea is to take in as much creativity as possible in order to give yourself plenty to work with. (I’m totally paraphrasing here and most likely not doing the idea justice, so you should really go and check out the eBook.) This, more than anything else, has helped me when I feel like I’m stuck creatively. I will spend time online looking at the work of other photographers, head out to a local museum to check out an art exhibit, or drive over to the bookstore to browse the art and photo sections. As I sit and observe the work of others, I almost always start to come up with ideas for work I want to make myself.
2. Changing Routines
Another thing I do when I’m feeling stuck is change my routine. This can be something small like trying to shoot at mid-day when the light is not what I normally prefer or something big like shooting at a single focal length for 30 days. The thing I’ve been trying recently to change my routine is to set the color mode on my camera to black and white. Since I shoot in RAW, the images show up in color when I upload them, but using this color mode means everything I see on my LCD is in black and white. It may not seem like a big change but I was amazed how different the world looked with the color taken away.
3. Revisiting Old Work
I touched on this one a bit in my previous post, The Digital Shoebox. The thing I’ve realized is that as I change, so does my photographic vision. When looking over my older pictures, I usually find things that catch my eye which I didn’t notice before. Images that I didn’t pay much attention to previously will now make me pause. And as I spend more and more time revisiting my old work, I also start to find themes in my work that I simply did not see before. Maybe it’s because enough time has passed and I can now see the forest from the trees, or maybe it’s because I’m learning to find commonalities in my work. Either way, revisiting my old work has not only help me find old images to work with, but has also given me ideas for new work that compliment what I already have.
