Newsletter - Finding inspiration when you don't feel like it...

Hi,

It's so hard sometimes, churning out that creativity. It's not like ordering a coffee, or finding a book in the library, it needs to find you. 

Over the years it's happened many times. I've been sent off to photograph someone and I just couldn't care less about it. Maybe I was having a bad day. Maybe the neighbours dog woke me up at 3am. Maybe the bus didn't come when it was supposed to, making my morning rushed. Either way, I'd show up on assignment totally discouraged. 100% feeling just blah...

So. 

How do you counter that feeling when your livelihood depends on you using your skillset to make a photograph?

I see two options:

1. Do something you have done before and know worked. When I got assignments for the business newspaper I'd use whatever was interesting around me and prop my subject around it somehow. Mostly I photographed people who worked in the financial sector, and they usually had two things in common: no time and no interest in having their photo made. So I'd find some interesting scene to place them in for a portrait. Like a good staircase. Or use off-camera flash for some interesting light. Or find a pop of colour or maybe the floor had an interesting pattern if I climbed up on a chair or table. Or just say something utterly ludicrous to make them laugh. If I was photographing a meeting or a press conference I'd find ways to photograph through something, or use the speaker's body language to make it more interesting. These were some of my go-tos on my off-days. For a longer assignment, like a feature story, I had a different approach:

2. Limit what you allow yourself to do and go nuts. So maybe for the first while only shoot at slow shutter speeds to get a blur effect. Or use a very long lens to narrow what you are able to fit in the frame. Or find a weird angle and use it for a while. 

In between I'd of course have to also photograph what was expected of me from the newspaper: the straight up and down this-happened-photograph, the close up of whomever so they would have a stamp sized photo should that person ever need to be squeezed into a single column in the future, and a variation of horizontal and verticals to please the layout designers to work around the ads. But more often than not, whenever I played at work, the images I made for myself were then ones that got selected and printed. 

Sometimes a bad day is just what you need to have a good day. Otherwise things get stagnant, which leads to monotony, which ofte leads to burnout. 

How do you rev up your creativity while with a client or on assignment? Hit reply and tell me!

All for now,

Kristine