This is not a tip on how to become an artist photographer in 1 week or anything similar. I do not believe in tricks either. This photography exercise for creativity can help you to learn but you need to dedicate your time to it regularly. I personally still do it every week and try to constantly track my progress.
If you want to take this exercise further, my guide to the golden triangle rule in photography explains how diagonal lines can help you build stronger compositions.
Table of Contents
What is creativity
Creativity is very important in almost any situation. This is something that I do for photography but it can help me in everyday life too. When you’re creative you can easily find new solutions to your tasks and problems that you may need to solve.
Creativity is about experimentation and this exercise may help you to experiment more. For example, recently, by experimenting, I have created an interesting abstraction. I would like to push this technique further and create more works in that style.
When I talk about this photography exercise for creativity I need to mention 2 ways of thinking:
Divergent thinking.
This is usually how children think. Children play and with a lot of excitement make up whole stories and imaginary worlds. They accept every idea that comes to mind and apply that to their games. Divergent thinking is creative.
Convergent thinking.
When we grow up the system tells us more and more about what we should and what shouldn’t do. Convergent thinking helps us to decide which ideas are worth it and which we need to omit. Convergent thinking is really important if we need to achieve something but it won’t help us to be creative. At the same time if we always used only divergent thinking we would be creative cavemen because we would try to apply all of our ideas without weighing their pros and cons.
What I offer
When we need both ways of thinking in our daily lives, convergent thinking often takes over and then we limit ourselves only to the most sensible (as seems to us) ideas, which aren’t always the best. I offer you to do this exercise to power up your divergent thinking and let your mind give you more new ideas. Most new ideas and experiments won’t work out but then you can switch your convergent thinking back on and choose the best out of the best!
How to do this photography exercise for creativity
To do this exercise you won’t need anything special, only your camera and any object that will become your main subject. Since creativity is about limitations we will limit you to one subject at a time. Below I will share some of the photos I have taken.
So please choose any object that you like. This might be a piece of furniture, your vintage camera, any decoration in your flat or your favourite jacket. You can also of course choose buildings, ships, trees and anything that you can shoot for an hour or so.
I did a bit similar thing when I created a project consisting of different photo manipulations with industrial architecture:
Industrial style fine art project by Fedor Vasilev
Once you have chosen an object, try to take as many unique shots of this object as you can. And when you feel like you ran out of ideas, take 5 more images either experimenting and trying to come up with something new or combining ideas from the previous shots. You will have to spend some time with it walking around and thinking of what else you can do.
Of course, you can apply different filters but taking 10 images with 10 different filters is not creative. A creative approach would be to make up some story that is happening with this object and then tell this story through a new photograph.
Let’s say: a woman comes to a restaurant with her own candle since she wants to use exclusively her candle and rejects the waiter to light the candle that was already on the table.
That’s a silly idea that I made up just now, but you can make all sorts of stories that you will need to try out before rejecting them. The most important is to switch on your imagination and divergent thinking and try out all of the ideas that come to you.
Below I will share some of the pictures that I took recently when doing this photography exercise for creativity.
Photography Exercise For Creativity: Candle
The main Idea was that the candle should be lit and I had to take at least 10 different images of it.
These are the 10 different shots of the candle that I have taken. Some of them are quite similar but it’s all right. This is the learning process and doing this photography exercise for creativity I try to not copy the approaches I used the last time, every time I try to come up with something new.
A few more words
I wish you a lot of fun trying this out! Especially if you feel like you don’t know what to shoot and have no new ideas, Take any object and come up with as many different shots as you can. Again, once you feel like you have no more ideas, stop and think and try to push yourself further and get at least a couple of more shots. You can get another abstract shot of this subject or use a different lighting technique or any props to highlight this object.
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