This post is part of a series entitled A Year With My Camera.
Lesson 4.4 in my own words
- 3 principles for finding inspiration
- Brainstorming stage - Spend 20 minutes writing down ideas without analyzing or criticizing them. There's no right or wrong at this stage, anything goes.
- Editing stage - Spend 20 minutes examining each idea from a practical standpoint. Cross off the least appealing ideas. If something seems impossible, look for alternatives. And remember that truly creative ideas seem crazy at one point.
- Incubation stage - State your goal and then go do something mundane for awhile. Don't force it. Your brain will work on the problem and an idea will be born.
This week's project
Come up with a new photography idea
- Follow the above three steps.
- Write it down
- Remember, this will be new for you
For photography inspiration, I have three ideas I'm interested in.
- Ideas
- An event like the late summer Renaissance Faire or minor league sports game.
- Time travel. I'd like a time machine that would take me back one year at a time, so I could see what our place looked like in the past. I'd take key photos at each time stop to compare.
- Travel documentary of photos only, focusing on unusual sights and places to go.
- Photo stories
- Rapid series action shots.
-
Editing. My travel days are over so that's out. A time machine is nowhere near practical, but a public event is
doable. I just have to bring my camera next time I go to something like
that. The others are doable now.
- No photos yet, but I've got some time to think about it and make it happen.
What I learned
These steps are pretty much the same thing Dan and I do for project
ideas. The method works very well! I never thought of applying it to something else however, so it's nice to see it as another tool to use.
2 comments:
Leigh, this is similar to general concepts in Brainstorming and the book Thinkertoys. For myself, the biggest thing I have found for moving this forward is actually that period of just letting things sit after I think them. The brain works in the background.
TB, that's exactly what she said, and what I've found to be true as well. I shouldn't be surprised someone put it in a book! I'm finding that just having this list inspires more ideas. Maybe it will help me begin to view photography differently.
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