Thinking Creatively

In this month’s online version of Peterson’s Photographic magazine, Ron Leach poses this question:

Have you ever found yourself in a photographic rut, where you just can’t seem to shake the creative doldrums and accomplish anything interesting? Don’t despair, because at one time or another all of us have experienced this type of frustration. I’ve found that one of the best ways to get back on track is to give myself a challenging photo assignment that involves subjects, equipment, or techniques that are different from my usual interests. Why not try the same thing yourself? You might be surprised at the images that result from the experiment.

You can read the rest of his article on the subject here.

That’s exactly the goal of the CMPG’s bi-monthly assignments — to sharpen one’s photographic skills and to learn to think creatively. Take the club’s current assignment, Alphabet, for example. The idea is to find letters of the English alphabet — or their shapes — in the common objects we see every day. The inspiration, by the way, was taken from an assigment for a high school art/photography class.

Other sources of inspiration for photographic subjects are the weekly Thursday Challenge and Photo Friday “photo memes.” Each week, these sites offer a new photographic challenge, and a vehicle to show off your work via the web (you need your own space to host the pictures, such as phototalk.net or flickr.com).