Look around you….there are fun and interesting photographs everywhere you look! We photographers often talk about how we “see the world differently” because we have trained our brains to look for interesting photographs, or even just interesting light, shapes, patterns or textures. In this post, I want to remind you all to look around and always be on alert for cool or interesting photographs, even if they aren’t in your chosen preference of subject categories.
On that note, just a brief aside for folks who might be challenged to “see” photographs outside of their chosen subject (landscape, wildlife, etc). I often identify as a landscape photographer, but in reality, I am a photographer who happens to enjoy landscape the most. I will also say that I am one who photographs light, texture, shape, pattern or anything interesting to me, no matter what the subject is. It is a gradual shift from when I started as just a “landscape photographer” in to one who enjoys all types of subjects if I find them visually interesting. Because I look around, I can find photographs just about anywhere. Granted, they might not be portfolio quality, or ones I want to use to build my brand, but they have some artistically redeeming qualities to me.
These days I see the world more as a “designer” than a “subject” photographer. Interesting shapes, color blocks, repeating patterns, textures, light qualities, etc. all contribute to my “design thinking” of aesthetics and photography. I often laugh at myself that these days I almost don’t care what the subject is if I can make a cool photograph that might be interesting to myself and others. This shift has occurred because I’m constantly looking around at my surroundings and noticing artistic qualities of seemingly mundane objects.
Back to my urging to look around all day every day. I want to share a couple of examples that I have shot in the last week, all on my iPhone, that I think illustrate my point that there are photographs everywhere! 
The above shot…do you know what this is? I think it’s kind of a cool abstract, something to engage the eyes and brain to try and figure out what you’re seeing. I took this because I loved the light reflection and the contrast and the repeating patterns. I found it very interesting, so I engaged my creative brain and took a photograph. Maybe you’ve figured it out, but these are raindrops on a black surface. The backstory for this photograph is that I was sitting at a high school football game watching my son play, in the pouring rain and I had an umbrella over my knees to keep my lower half dry. At one point I looked down and noticed the pattern on the umbrella and thought it was very interesting! I got out my phone, shot a couple of frames and then went back to cheering for the game. I took the time to look around, notice some artistic qualities nearby, then engage my photographers brain to create a few images.
In this next example, it turns out I even surprised myself with what I saw and how it engaged my creative brain. I was having lunch with a photographer friend of mine at a local restaurant. We were engaged in a lively conversation about photography, creativity and such and I had started in on the subject of looking around and finding photographs everywhere. When the words left my mouth, my eyes started looking around the restaurant and instantly zeroed in on this light fixture.
I knew instantly there were a couple of decent photographs in that fixture to illustrate my point that you can find a neat shot almost anywhere if you look around enough. In the middle of the conversation I grabbed my phone and stood underneath the light fixture, in the middle of the restaurant probably looking like a fool, and shot the below image. I was intrigued by the design elements of the center of the fixture and knew I could create a “design themed” shot that is about lines and shapes.
When I got back to the table I showed my friend and he mentioned he saw that fixture too, but was more drawn to the colored lights on the ends of the arms. I knew I couldn’t shoot that because there was a big speaker in the middle of the fixture that would ruin the photograph, so I zoomed in my vision to look at lines and shapes and came away with the above. By the way, these are unprocessed images from my phone, so don’t judge me too harshly 🙂 I then began to look around the restaurant even more and saw so many possibilities for cool artistic images. Granted, they would be more abstract or design-theme photographs, but still, they might be interesting and exciting and more importantly, would engage my creative brain. I still am thinking that I may go back to this restaurant and do a whole series of photographs, and video, to further prove my point that you can make cool images almost anywhere. Just look at that wall below…..there are at least 5-6 neat photographs that I can see in there, maybe more!
The reason that I am writing this to you today, urging you to look around, is that our creativity is like a muscle that needs to be exercised and flexed in order to grow healthy and strong. For years I’ve focused some of my creative development energy towards building up this muscle and part of the way I have done that is to look around as I go through my everyday life. Learning how to “see” creatively and find compositions is a learned skill…I think we’ve all experienced this and hopefully understand. When I was just starting out as a photographer, I used to be amazed when I would shoot with more experienced photographers that they would come away from a scene with amazing photographs that I didn’t see. At that point I committed myself to building up the skill to see creatively so I could find and create beautiful images.
My very strong belief is that by building up this muscle in the course of my everyday life, photographing subjects that aren’t my “preferred” subject, I am building up this creative muscle that will help me in the field when I am photographing something I prefer and am more passionate about, hopefully resulting in better photographs. Just like an athlete who spends hours training in the gym before hitting the field to perform their best, I “train” by observing and photographing in my every day life so that I can perform even better on location, my field of play.
The concept here is the design structure of the bricks, patterns and then the randomness of a lemon.
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