Variations

Creativity, Creativity - Storytelling, Magazine  Comment
0 Likes


Here’s an excerpt from my article in the current issue of After Capture magazine.
“Once you’ve identified the core concerns, strengths, and weaknesses a body of work your path becomes clearer. Stick to your strong points; repeat them. Eliminate or minimize weaknesses. Introduce small variations of less essential items to add life, complexity, and nuances to the work. Enrich text with subtext. Make a list of possible variations upon the elements that you’ve identified. Consider, different points of view and different combinations of elements. Keep adding to your list as time goes on. It’s likely you’ll generate many more ideas than you can accomplish in a short time. With these options in mind you’ll never run out of ideas to pursue. Pursue only the very best ideas; let the lesser ideas pass you by. How do you evaluate new ideas? Ask yourself some questions. How much repetition leads to saturation (adding more information without adding anything new)? How much variation can you support without losing track of the essential idea and starting a new one? Does including a variation reinforce or distract from the entire body of work and its theme? If it reinforces it, include it. If it distracts from it, set it aside for another use. Quite often these images can start new bodies of work. They can even serve as bridges between related bodies of work. Engaging this process consciously increases the likelihood that you will produce the more significant results both now and in the future. You’ll know what to move forward on and when to move forward. You’ll know what to defer and when to defer it so you don’t get sidetracked …”
Find my PDFs on Creativity here.
Learn these and other core concepts in my workshops.

Play

Creativity, Creativity - Exercises  Comment
0 Likes


Each summer my we go to Italy to visit my wife’s family. My son and I share point and shoot camera’s and make whimsical interpretations of our experiences there. I’ve learn a lot when I take time to play. I become more versatile and improvisational. I take interest in and see things I never would have seen otherwise. I see things in new ways. The reasons I make different kinds of images and the expectations I have for them become clearer. Play’s valuable. Really valuable. And fun! Take time to play.
Check out my Creativity workshops here.

Family Albums

Creativity  Comment
0 Likes


I make family albums every year. If I didn’t have the project and deadline and a commitment to others I might not take the time to find, finish, and print the best images. Without identifying the use for them, I might not make many of the images. Now we have a useful a family record. How important is this? I hear these kinds of things are the things people take with them first if they have to evacuate their houses in a disaster.
One of the keys to the success of any project is to make it easy and fun to do. Make it easy to make the images. I use a point and shoot that’s always nearby. Make it easy to store. I’ve got one place I keep all the material that I organize as it accumulates. Make it easy to process. I use many automation features such as Lightroom’s Export function and Photoshop’s Actions and Image Processor to get the job done fast. Make it easy to produce. Lightroom generates contact sheets in seconds. Blurb makes putting books together a matter of hours not days or weeks; they can even deliver the books to family members.
These days, I imagine some people have online family albums.
What’s your family album like?
Check out Blurb here.
Check out my Creativity workshops here.

Bulletin Boards

Creativity  Comment
0 Likes


This is my bulletin board. It’s full of ideas I’m working on. Finished images. Snapshots. Clippings. Text. You name it. Frequently seeing the ideas I’m working on helps me develop them on an ongoing basis. I’m constantly incubating ideas. The board changes dynamically. I make photographs like this one to record it’s current state. The collection of photographs is a kind of journal.
Get a space. Your own space. Fill it with inspiration. Keep filling it.
Check out my Creativity workshops here.

How Do Live With Your Images?

Creativity  Comment
0 Likes


How do you live with your images? You make a lot of them. 1% get finished. Some become used in projects – slideshows, exhibits, books, etc. But, day to day, how do you revisit our images?
Website (gallery or splashpage)?
Online social network (Flickr or other)?
Computer desktop?
Printed contact sheets?
Post up boards (refrigerator or bulletins)?
Single prints?
Portfolios?
Print exhibits (in house/studio or offsite)?
Desktop calendar?
Greeting cards?
Posters?
Books (published or self-published)?
Give yourself many ways to look at and interact with your work – frequently. You’ll come to understand it better. Ways to improve it will become clear. New ideas will come to light.
How many other ways can you think of? Comment here!
Check out my Creativity workshops here.

Learn to Earn

Audio, Creativity  Comment
0 Likes

learntoearn


Learn to earn. The more you know the more opportunities lie before you. The more you know the more productive you are. The more you know the better your product becomes. The more you know the more valuable you are. Investing in your knowledge base and skill set is the best investment you can make. Make time to learn. Learn after you wake up. Get up early and spend an hour inspiring yourself and satisfying your curiosity. Continue learning by doing new things during the day. Learn before you go to sleep. Go to bed early and read or watch educational enriching material. Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers suggests it takes 10,000 hours to become a master in a given field. You can’t make10,000 hours go faster, or pass them without interruption, but you can get to there one hour at a time. And you don’t have to spend 10,000 hours to see immediate benefits. Sometimes all it takes to transform ordinary into extraordinary is one good idea. But that one good idea won’t find you. You’ve got to find it. Make time to explore the hidden potentials in any situation and in yourself. Make time to learn. You’ll start earning immediately.
Listen to more creativity tips here.

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell

Books, Creativity  Comment
0 Likes


10,000 hours. The amount of time it takes to become an expert at something. That’s 40 hours a week for 250 weeks or 4.8 years. That’s what most people talk about when they talk about Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers : The Story of Success. But Gladwell goes much further than this. There are many other components to success. Culture. Family. Attitude. Receptivity. Flexibility. Versatility. Opportunity. Timing. Luck.
“Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky – but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.”
He gives many great examples, told in his inimitable style, part social psychology, part mystery/thriller. Perhaps the most interesting is the final chapter, the story of his own personal family history. Including this is an interesting move, not just from a human interest point of view, not just from the history of race relations, but also that he unveils many of the elements of his success portraying it as an inherited legacy. He’s right, in part. And this does no disservice to his individual accomplishments. Implied in this final chapter is that Gladwell is exceptional. He is.
All of Gladwell’s books are brilliant. Outliers is very good. Tipping Point is truly great. Blink is amazing.

Find them here, along with other books I recommend.
Learn about success in creativity in my upcoming Creativity workshop.

Kids

Creativity  Comment
0 Likes


Kids do the most creative things. My seven year old son asked for the big box my new Epson 9900 printer arrived in. He spent the next half hour quietly working in the gallery. Then he invited my wife to come have her picture made. He’d cut a small flap in one side of the box and put a seat on the inside, got a stack of blank cards, and a box of crayons. Led by the hand, she sat inside. He looked through the flap – and drew her portrait. On the outside of the box he wrote “photo booth”. We just don’t have the heart to take it down. We smile every time we look at it. Want to be more creative? Spend more time with kids. And spend more time being childlike.
Check out my Creativity and Field workshops here.
Check out my Digital Printing workshops here.
Check out the Epson Print Academy here.

Syl Arena – Lessons I Didn't Learn in Photo School

Creativity, Photographers  Comment
0 Likes


Syl Arena recently wrote a great guest blog entry on Scott Kelby’s PhotoshopInsider.com. The topics list alone is a good touchstone. If you know this stuff, it’s a nice reminder. If you don’t know this stuff, you need to. It’s good food for thought.
1. If you can’t be remarkable, be memorable.
2. You are NOT defined by your photo gear or your computer’s operating system.
3. Powerful photographs touch people at a depth they don’t anticipate.
4. You have to let your images go out into the world without you.
5. Cross-pollinate with photographers and other creatives.
6. Photography slices time. Photography gathers time.
7. Learning to create photographs that “look” like your world should be only a milestone – not the destination.
8. “Coopetition” is a new business model that’s here to stay.
9. Wars have been fought to protect your copyrights.
10. Your photographs have value. Don’t give them away.
11. Your photographs have value. Give them away.
12. Resist the temptation to become a pro photographer.
Read the rest of the post here.
Check out more from Syl at Pixsylated.
And stay tuned for more. Syl actually wrote 48 topics, which he plans to follow up on.

Photograph With Someone Else

Creativity, Photography  Comment
0 Likes




–
Another highlight of my recent South American Cruising Through Life workshop came on the last day. Vincent Versace (his wife Sylvia) and I (and my wife Ardie) spent the weekend in Buenos Aires. Vinnie and I got up early and went to the largest graveyard in the world (resting place of Eva Peron). Vinnie immediately started shooting a detail of a lightpost, ivy, and flowers in dappled light – typical Versace. I never would have selected the shot – typical Caponigro. So I said, “Hey Vinnie! How ’bout we shadow each other for the next hour and shoot each others’ pictures.” We had a great time seeing the same place through entirely different eyes. His tendency was to find the significant detail. My tendency was to get create an establishing shot with significant relationships. We chose different lenses. We moved differently. We moved at different paces. But most importantly, we looked differently. It was really revealing to both of us, about both ourselves and each other and ultimately about photography. We saw through each others’ eyes. Honestly, this is one of the major reasons I got into photography. Two people using the same or similar equipment make such different pictures! How does that happen? Find out! I highly recommend you find a friend to photograph with – and make each others’ pictures. Do it frequently.
Find more creativity tips here.
Find out more about Cruising Through Life here.
Find out more about Vincent Versace here.
Find out more about my upcoming workshops here.
Sign up for Insights for advance notice and discounts on upcoming workshops.