I encourage you to engage in some creative workouts whenever you go out with your camera.  I’ve often spoke of creativity as a “muscle” that needs regular exercise to stay fit and responsive and so doing creative workouts to keep your vision and skills sharp is important.

Let me ask you…as your sitting there reading this, when was the last time you had your camera in your hands and actively working on a composition?  For some, the answer will be “a long time” and for others maybe just the other day.   When we are not actively working on creative photography, our creative muscles tend to atrophy a bit.  When we do go out, we feel rusty and may need a few hours, or days, to re-awaken our creativity and get it operating at peak performance.  It takes energy and practice to create good photographs..it’s not luck or happenstance, it takes skill, practice, patience and thought to make it all come together.  It can be “work” to take the best photograph possible!

That’s where creative workouts to exercise your creative muscles comes in handy to 1. Keep your skills sharp and toned and 2. To grow stronger creatively by challenging yourself and pushing yourself to do things you haven’t done before, solve creative challenges or simply working outside of your comfort zone.

 I recently returned from leading a photo workshop in the Palouse and during this time I had the chance to challenge myself and the workshop participants and engage in some creative workouts to build or strengthen their creative muscles.  Here are a couple of ideas that I would encourage you to try next time you go out

Limit Your Gear

You have probably heard this one before but I’ll say it again….go out and challenge yourself to create photos with limited gear.  Most often this is done by going out with only one lens.  You are challenged to work within that focal length and your vision starts to be “tuned” to “see” in that focal length.  This can be a fantastic exercise to force yourself to create pleasing photos without having all of your tools.  Learning to work with what you have helps to build creative skills, working through limitations in gear.

On this most recent trip, I took the group to a location that is full of fascinating detail, both large and small.  Instead of limiting myself to only one lens for the entire shoot, I modified this creative workout to suit my mood at the time.  I put on a medium telephoto lens and spent time working with just that lens…seeing through this longer lens and finding unique subjects/stories that worked well with the lens.  After a lap or two of the location, I then switched to a macro lens and repeated the circuit, looking with fresh eyes and focal length to once again find unique shots that worked well with this particular lens/focal range.

Create Photos in Challenging Locations

Another creative workout involves challenging yourself to create photos in locations that may not speak to you or are less than ideal.  When we are photographing in favorable, or easy, locations, we don’t have to work as hard to find and execute photographs.  Our energy may be in-tune with the location and the creative juices just flow.  In contrast, when we are at less than ideal locations, we my feel a struggle to “see” photos and take them.  Instead of being frustrated, view this as a challenge and an opportunity to grow!  This is skill building and helps you to grow your creative muscles!

One evening in the Palouse we chased the shadows for a while and then had to settle down in one location to photograph the sunset.  I brought the group to one location that I knew had potential and one “easy” subject.  I knew that a couple of the folks were not overjoyed to be there, but after some explanation of why we were there and the opportunities we had to further develop our creative muscles, everyone got down to work and made some great photographs in this location.   My workshops are not tours, we work, learn, grow and I will challenge my attendees to stretch their creativity and shoot locations and subjects that they might not normally shoot.  I know that these creative workouts will help them grow and develop more fully as artists and learn skills that they can use long after the workshop is over.

Solve Creative Puzzles

Solving creative puzzles can flex and develop your mental muscles.  Figuring out how to shoot something in a compelling or attractive way is like solving a puzzle that activates different parts of your brain and helps to grow your cognitive abilities when shooting photographs.  It is one of my favorite creative workouts!

There are times when I see some pattern, shape, texture, subject, feature, etc that catches my attention and I pause to examine it.  I recognize the trigger that there is “something there” that got my attention and that’s what stops me.  The next decision I have to make is whether I will work the puzzle and see if there is something there I can photograph and if so, how best to photograph. This is the creative puzzle of figuring out how best to photograph something that is intriguing.

One of the keys to this creative workout is letting go of expectations that it will be a “good” photograph.  Just engaging in the act of figuring out how to shoot it is reward enough.  Oftentimes these exercises do not result in a good photo for me…but they do build my creative muscles and help to hone my vision and ability to put together visual elements when I’m shooting a more pleasing scene.

Again in the Palouse during our first stop one morning, we were at a barn doing lots of detail work with wagon wheels and weathered wood and such.  I was taking a break and standing around the back of the structure chatting with a client and I happened to look up and see some of the rafters/beams supporting a part of the roof.  At the angle I was standing in relation to the beams, what struck me was the converging line and the different angles.  I stopped my conversation and turned my, and my clients, attention to this feature.  I commented that this would be a good exercise to try and figure out how best to solve this creative puzzle and create a pleasing photograph.  We spent 10 minutes or so working the puzzle and below is the best capture that I made. This isn’t a portfolio image, but I do feel satisfaction that I worked the puzzle and came up with something that I thought was the best I could do at that time.

A large part of what makes photographs pleasing to look at is that all of the visual elements work together and it “feels” good.  The relationship of the elements to one another, the visual weight, balance, symmetry, etc., all just work.  This doesn’t happen by chance.  It is a result of practice and hard work by the photographer.  Shots like the above help me look at spatial relationships, angles, eye movement, and the such. It was great practice that I know will go in to my knowledge bank and may be used in the future.

I hope that you can see how creative workouts might help you to build your creative muscles, or keep them sharp, so that when you are in a great location with great conditions, you can minimize the time knocking off the rust and maximize your time in the field to come home with some amazing photographs.