Sunday, March 11, 2012

How I learn to see things differently and be more creative

In an attempt to learn to look at subjects with different eyes and be more creative I have choose the Mobile-home,  the infamous Trailer as a subject. I felt that this would offer a good challenge to my creative process and force me to think "Out of the Box" if I had any hope of making any good images at all. Often while out shooting with my photography buddy and would stop at a trailer to shoot,
 I would ask him if he was interested,  he would say "no, that's your style" and just sit in the car checking his email on his I-Phone.Which is OK.  But is the point of the project in the first place, which is to brake my NORMAL pattern/style of working  and try something different. One that forces you to look and think differently about what your doing.  Put another way
 "Get out of your comfort zone"
 and challenge yourself to do something new.You might find that it was fun and you
 learned a new trick or two along the way, I did.
Images number 6 and 4 are good technically but aren't very interesting and do not draw you into look at them beyond a quick look. But they do show what I'm saying about picking a subject that your not comfortable with.  They also demonstrate that I was still looking at the problem with old eyes and not thinking out of the box yet. The comfort zone is a hard thing to brake but it can be retrained.
  
I photographer many trailers before I started to find a look and feel that made me feel like
I was getting somewhere. It didn't happen right away, it took a few months before I was
 feeling satisfied with the results. The vision started to form in my minds eye and I could see
how I as going to capture the image and post processing it to get the look that I wanted.
The challenge had worked! I was seeing in a new way. A way that lent it self to the
 creation of other new images of subjects that I had long felt, " I was just not
 get the image to speak to the viewers". In the process of this project (on going )
 I have developed new skills that I will be refining while I continue to look for
 new opportunities to explore and inspire me to reach past me own vision and create new
uses for what I have learned so far.

You don't have to like the images that I've created and shown in this post.  But I do hope that you can see the transformation in in my creative process and that it inspires you to find your own challenge
and to look for new ways to see the subjects you do and don't like to photograph.

good luck--------------------------------------------------------------- Peter


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Copyright 2012 - Peter Manship - all rights reserved
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