The act of photography is inherently creative. I suppose it’s a fact that is easily lost in this digital age – where once, unexposed film was exposed to the light, then processed and often printed. You then had something physically in your hands to show for it, a negative, and slide, and/or a print. Something was created. Now, with digital photography, the images that don’t get deleted before they leave the camera, get stored on a computer somewhere, a series of 1’s and 0’s, difficult to imagine as some thing. But what do we create when we make a photograph? Organization of visual elements, information – a communication (hopefully), an emotion.
In my own photography, while I feel I have made strides in the last few years, I don’t feel I am as creative as I could be. Each time I take on a project, I seem to produce images quite similar to ones I have already seem before. On the one hand, I am happy to be gaining the skills to be able to produce images similar to ones I admire. But, on the other hand, I’d like to stretch further, to begin to find a vocabulary of my own. I suppose I’m looking for the same sense of discovery, now, through the camera, as I’ve had about the camera over the last few years.
So, I hope to foster a discussion about creativity in photography. What comes after shutter speeds, f-stops and the rule of thirds?
43mm to Creativity 