Challenge yourself to grow your creativity and photography

Challenge yourself to grow your creativity and photography….its a simple statement, but ofttimes hard to accomplish.  I am a continual learner, I love being challenged and learning new things.  It keeps life interesting and gives me something to look forward to which motivates me in day to day life.  Striving to learn something new, striving to be a more well-rounded person, working to be a better photographer….whatever you may want to do, improving yourself is all good with very little, if any, downsides.  One of the easiest ways I’ve found to learn is to challenge myself to something that will provide a learning experience.  Below I’ll list out a few examples of challenges

Learning comes at a bit of a price though.  Firstly, it takes time.  You may not have a lot of time in your day to day life if you’re a parent, have a full-time job, etc.  Your free time is valuable and is often taken up with more mundane things like taking care of the house, or the yard, or running errands.  But trust me, you can devote a few minutes each day to learning something new.    Secondly, learning requires commitment, you need to be committed and have the desire to make the time and be focused and present for learning.  Oftentimes it’s too easy to say to ourselves, “I’ll do it tomorrow” and when tomorrow comes, we find another excuse.  You need to set a regular schedule and stick to it.  Thirdly, learning takes energy, mental and sometimes physical energy to accomplish.  If you are devoting the time to learning you will need to be focused and not distracted, which takes energy, plus taking in unfamiliar information and processing it takes a ton of energy as well.  Recognize this fact in yourself and make sure you take breaks and don’t burn yourself out in the first couple sessions.  You know yourself well, so plan an appropriate amount of time for the energy you have.

There are many different ways that you can challenge yourself to grow your creativity and photography.  Here are just a couple of quick ones as idea starters for you…

• Shoot a new genre of photography that you’ve not shot before or are not comfortable with

  • Shooting something that pushes you out of your comfort zone will force you to think about your photography differently, perhaps use new functions on your camera that  you haven’t used before, and “see” differently for composition and post processing. When I get the chance I’ll try and shoot motorsports or aviation images….things that I enjoy but have not really tried to shoot artistically.  It really challenges me.  Or you can not go too far afield and shoot in areas that you normally shoot, like landscapes, but try to shoot them very differently.  Instead of grand sweeping landscapes, challenge yourself to shoot intimate landscapes or abstracts using natural elements.

• Use only one lens at a particular location

  • This is a great exercise for teaching us how to see and move differently when photographing.  Start with using only one zoom lens, pick whichever focal length you want and photograph a scene thoroughly.  This will teach you how to “see” scenes in a particular focal length, or range and forcing you to think of compositions based upon a limited range.  This will grow the skills in you to assess a particular scene and then know which lens you might like to use with a lot more confidence.   Once you’ve tried this, raise the difficulty level a bit by using a prime lens.  This will force you to move your feet and work to compose a scene differently.  Or, it may mean that you can’t shoot a particular composition because the focal length isn’t “right”…so you need to find a different composition.  Finally, another variation on this is to use a lens that you wouldn’t ever think of using for a particular setting.  For example, I’ve shot waterfalls with my 100mm-400mm lens, which was very challenging as I couldn’t fit the whole waterfall in the composition, so I had to get very creative in how I shot the water and surrounding foliage.

Bill Course shooting in the Canadian Rockies

• Dive in to a photo editing software that you don’t know very well

  • This is an easy one to do at home and I’m guessing you already have photo editing software on your computer that you haven’t used or don’t know very well.  What a great way to challenge yourself!  Open up that software and learn how to use it.  You may find some new looks or new techniques that you can apply in your regular processing suite of tools.  If you don’t have any new tools lying around, you can dive in to your existing software and learn something new about it.  Software these days as a HUGE amount of features and we typically use just a fraction of them.  So, jump in and learn something new.  The great thing about this tip is that there are a ton of YouTube videos on just about every subject, so you can find tutorials on how to explore the software.

• Publish a book of your favorite photographs

  • Many of you have probably already self-published a book, so you may be asking why is this challenging?  The reason I’m listing this here is that this activity might teach you how to better curate your images in to a book that is more focused or tells a deeper story.  Having to cull our favorite images to an amount that is reasonable to print is no easy task.  Books can be expensive to print and you need to maximize each page with only the very best images, so the act of curating, or critiquing each image, will be critical.  Evaluating each image, looking at their strengths and weaknesses, the moods and colors, the stories or emotions contained within, will have a wide reaching effect in your everyday photography as it will instill in  you a more discerning eye in composing a scene and your camera settings to translate the scene just as you want it.

• Learn something new to inspire you creatively

  • My good friend Jack Graham is an ex-musician and does a fantastic job of equating music to photography, how the score and the performance are like the composition and the final print/output.  I’m a lover of music and find that the expressiveness of music can be very similar to the expressiveness of photography.  I often think about how the different notes/compositional elements in a performance make up the whole of the finished song/photograph.  I have longed to make music (my high school trumpet days don’t count) as a way to keep my creativity and expressiveness flowing.  I feel that doing anything that is creative, be it music, ceramics, painting, or whatever will keep our creative juices alive and flowing, which will then translate to our photography.    One of the ways I’m recently challenging myself is to learn how to create music using a digital keyboard and sound pad.  I picked up a used Roli Songmaker Kit and am just starting the long learning curve.  This will be a challenging learning curve for me as I’ve never played a keyboard.  I hope to develop my skills enough that it will turn in to a useful hobby as well as something that will allow me to create soundtracks for the various videos I produce.  As I said I’m a constant learner and I do love a challenge, so this will be a big one for me that will keep me springing out out bed to learn this new tool.

Challenge yourself to grow your creativity and photography.  It doesn’t take much to see improvement and you can do this will as little or as much time as possible in your day to day lives.  What are some challenges that you could set for yourself?   If you are willing, please share them in the comments, I’d love to hear how you will challenge yourself.