The Art of Photography: Exploring New Perspectives and Overcoming Creative Blocks

As I sat down to watch the latest video on the art of photography, I was struck by the way the subject matter resonated with me. The video, which featured a rabbi telling a story about how people often struggle with change when they enter new territory, such as a wilderness survival situation. The rabbi explained that initially, people complain about the food, water, and comfort level, and even compare their current situation unfavorably to past experiences. However, this is where the lesson becomes important: in order to truly move forward and explore new creative horizons, one must be willing to go through a period of transition and transformation.

This concept can be applied to our own lives as photographers, particularly when it comes to overcoming creative blocks or feeling stuck. Just like the rabbi's example, we often find ourselves comparing our current work to past successes, expecting similar results with minimal effort. However, this mindset is rooted in insanity, as the famous phrase goes - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

As someone who has struggled with creative blocks themselves, I can attest to the importance of finding new perspectives and approaches. The video's theme of transformation and growth resonated deeply with me, particularly when it comes to pushing beyond our comfort zones and exploring new styles and techniques. By doing so, we open ourselves up to new opportunities for inspiration and innovation.

One idea that caught my attention was the suggestion to collaborate with individuals from outside the photography community, such as graphic designers or artists. This could lead to fresh perspectives and new ideas, pushing us out of our usual creative ruts. I would love to explore this concept further in future videos, potentially featuring interviews with collaborators who have brought unique insights and approaches to their work.

In my own experience, one of the biggest stumbling blocks I've faced is finding time for photography amidst a busy schedule. Between family obligations and a day job, it can be challenging to secure dedicated time for creative pursuits. However, this has also led me to appreciate the importance of being intentional with our time and making the most of every opportunity.

The video's theme of transformation and growth also made me think about my own creative journey and the importance of stepping outside my comfort zone. As photographers, we often fall into familiar patterns and habits, but it's essential to recognize when these are holding us back. By embracing new challenges and approaches, we can tap into fresh sources of inspiration and creativity.

The video also reminded me of the value of community and support in our creative pursuits. The suggestion to check out a friend's show, Jill's web series, was particularly appealing, as it highlighted the importance of connecting with others who share our passions. In a world where social media can sometimes feel isolating, it's refreshing to see someone advocating for live interactions and real-time engagement.

As I reflect on these ideas and themes, I'm excited to explore new directions in my own photography practice and share them with you through future videos. Whether it's collaborating with outsiders, finding creative solutions to time constraints, or embracing transformation and growth, I believe that by working together and pushing beyond our limits, we can create something truly remarkable.

The video ended on a note of enthusiasm and encouragement, inviting viewers to engage with the channel and share their own experiences and perspectives. As someone who is passionate about photography and creative expression, I couldn't agree more. By joining forces and supporting one another, we can create a community that inspires growth, innovation, and artistic excellence.

So, if you're feeling stuck or looking for new ways to challenge yourself as a photographer, I encourage you to keep watching and engaging with the channel. Let's explore these ideas together, push beyond our limits, and discover new sources of inspiration and creativity. The art of photography is all about embracing transformation and growth - let's get started!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video I want to talk about the concept of creative thinking and how this applies to photography because I think this is very important it's something that I've started to bring up a lot in the last couple weeks particularly in these videos I've done talking about these photo assignments that we're going to do and you guys were very receptive to that idea but it's very enthusiastic and it's something that we're going to move forward on in thinking this through though I want to be very mindful of how we present this because I want to be something that you guys get something out of something that's very beneficial something that is useful and it makes you a better photographer what I don't want it to be is our theme this week is trees go shoot a tree and I just think that's a waste of everybody's time that's not going to improve anybody skills or move anybody into a different place beyond where they are now and so that's what I'm trying to be mindful and that's why it's taking a little while to put these together but I want to talk about the concept of creative thinking and I want to open this as a discussion so I want to get your feedback on a few things but let me get into this so you'll know what exactly I'm looking for I'm going to start off with a very bold statement here that is slightly opinionated that few people may find shocking but hear me through I believe that photography in and of itself is not creative just the base level of photography is not a creative act at all and let me compare that to some things let's say that if you I grab that note card over there and that pencil and make a mark on the piece of paper well am I an artist did I just draw something no I made a mark on a piece of paper if I go grab a bunch of mashed potatoes and leave mount let them dry did I make a sculpture no I made a mess you could argue that I'm making conceptual arts or contemporary art but even conceptual art has a thought process behind it so what makes photography creative is the idea of creative thinking and how are you approaching what you're doing or give you an example the artist series that I'm working on this year will have nine of those by the end of the year the first three are live now and if you look at the three artists that we've got up bill Wegman Alexi Teddy Renko and Laura Wilson even if you didn't know who they were and you just put their images out on a table you would see three very distinctive styles of photography well why is that different than the bulk of what's on Instagram or the internet where there's a lot of homogeneous photographs of similar things on their people's dogs or parties or whatever this is three distinctive well the difference is there is a lot of creative thinking a lot of intelligence and a lot of artistic ability that went into being the very best of the best which is what they are and so that is a key component to making photography a creative process if you can do that photography can be very creative and that is important to understand the difference the camera does not make pictures we make pictures and it comes from you it comes from within and that's really really important and if you look at any medium and I think it is important to look at other mediums it's important to get beyond photography sometimes and it's important to listen to music it's important to go to theatre go to movies read it's important to experience these things because if you lock yourself into the world of photography you have a distractions generated and to whom wonder what lens they used or what kind of camera was this shot with or why did they use that f-stop because the depth of feels too shallower you know you start to have all these technical details which are just technical details sure their tools and their choices that go into making a photograph but when you get outside of photography and into a different medium I think there's something that can be gained from that on a creative level where you don't have those distractions you strip that away and you're left with just the creative possibilities and that style of creative thinking and I think that's really important let me give you an example here and you're gonna have to hear me out on this I will not make this story too long but I think it's really important to my point here I have a friend who is a colleague and a very dear friend and he is Jewish and he called me a few weeks ago and he said he said hey my mom and I are going to do this show on Facebook come check it out well his mother is a rabbi she's extremely smart she's brilliant and I'm not Jewish but I went over there because I liked them and so I watched the show and it was very entertaining and basically the show is called ask a rabbi and it's an interactive show where you can type questions in and ask as the things going on so it's a two-way conversation and you know I was very entertained by this and I was watching it just the other day on Sunday they do this every Sunday the time differs but I'll put the link in the description if you're interested in checking it out but the video that they were doing or the little presentation the live thing they were doing was called lessons from the wilderness and if you're Jewish you'll know all this stuff but if you're not let me give you the gist of it so basically Moses goes and gets the Israelites out of Egypt and their bondage and slavery and he's to take them to the promised land well between slavery in the promised land you have this thing called the wilderness and in very poetic biblical fashion they use the number 40 to represent a long time and they are in the wilderness for 40 years the interesting thing though is that the wilderness is a period of transformation and it is metaphoric and it's something that we can apply to our lives in modern world and I'm sitting there watching her talk about this and I'm like this completely applies to creative thinking to photography to everything that we're striving to do in our lives we have something we've done in the past and we want to move forward where we're going to have to go through that transitional period in the wilderness and so she was talking about that and she said you know one of the first things that happens when they get into the wilderness is that people start complaining the food sucks there's not enough water they're uncomfortable they're out in the wilderness it's not really cool it's kind of like wearing on everybody and mentally they're kind of still stuck in the slavery era because they look back at that and they start to talk about the fish and they had food at least and it was better than what they're in now they feel like they've taken a step backwards and this is an important lesson to learn because in order to get beyond into something new into new territory that you want to handle you're going to have to go through this transformation the famous phrase that you hear all the time is what's the definition of insanity it's doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result so if in the past your creative thinking has been a system of two plus three equals five and five has been cool but now you really want to move up to ten or twenty well two and three ain't going to cut it and it could be that addition in giving a cut so you're going to have to figure out a different process to move forward anyway that's my my analogy but this is something this is a different meaning this isn't even really art necessarily although you could certainly make the case that there is an art fulness to it but this is a rabbi telling a story and talking about how something applies to our lives and I thought it was amazing because I'm not Jewish but it just really spoke to me because there are certain applications that I deal with where this makes perfect sense and it's a whole new style and system of thinking so coming back around to where I want to open the conversation and what I want your thoughts on are a couple things one would you find it interesting if I brought non photographers into this occasionally so this could be a collaboration video or maybe an interview I do with somebody who is not a photographer I've talked to gentleman who is a graphic designer in fact he's a very well-known graphic designer I think he would be wonderful and I know an artist that I know would do this so I think would be wonderful to that that would provide a little bit different perspective into what we're doing with these assignments that might push us in a new direction so I want to know one if you think that would be interesting too I want to know and there are no right or wrong answers here so I don't want two people to feel like they're going to say something that's silly or something like that there's nothing silly this is just I want to get a feel for what some of the stumbling blocks that you might have are and I'll give you some of the common ones that I hear so a lot of times people think well I get into a rut I get burnt out and I'm not inspired and how do I get out of that how do I get inspired again so that you know if that's you you can say that another one that I hear a lot is that well between family and my day job I really only have an hour for photography on the weekends so I really that is it seems to be one of my hang-ups is that I just have such limited time so that's a perfectly good summary of a problem you could have so I want to know what are some of the stumbling blocks that you guys have what I'm going to do with all this is I want to put this together into what these assignments are going to be and I really want these to be something that are unusual something that are different than anything you can find anywhere else there's a lot of stuff that you can find if you want to do critiques or if you want to go do photo assignments there are plenty of photo challenges out there I don't want to repeat that on this and I've kind of mentioned that before I want this to be something special something interesting and something that you guys get something out of anyway so let me know what you think if you've enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it subscribe to the art of photography so you'll be up-to-date on all the latest and greatest I will link up to my friend Jill's web stuff below check her show out it's awesome you can go watch the replays but it's probably more interesting to see while it's live because you can actually interact there's a lot of hey welcome to the room and stuff like that when you're watching it in retrospective so you might have to skip around but it's an excellent show they're very funny they're very good friends of mine and that's just something in my week that made me think a little bit differently so I'll see you guys in the next video till then laterin this video I want to talk about the concept of creative thinking and how this applies to photography because I think this is very important it's something that I've started to bring up a lot in the last couple weeks particularly in these videos I've done talking about these photo assignments that we're going to do and you guys were very receptive to that idea but it's very enthusiastic and it's something that we're going to move forward on in thinking this through though I want to be very mindful of how we present this because I want to be something that you guys get something out of something that's very beneficial something that is useful and it makes you a better photographer what I don't want it to be is our theme this week is trees go shoot a tree and I just think that's a waste of everybody's time that's not going to improve anybody skills or move anybody into a different place beyond where they are now and so that's what I'm trying to be mindful and that's why it's taking a little while to put these together but I want to talk about the concept of creative thinking and I want to open this as a discussion so I want to get your feedback on a few things but let me get into this so you'll know what exactly I'm looking for I'm going to start off with a very bold statement here that is slightly opinionated that few people may find shocking but hear me through I believe that photography in and of itself is not creative just the base level of photography is not a creative act at all and let me compare that to some things let's say that if you I grab that note card over there and that pencil and make a mark on the piece of paper well am I an artist did I just draw something no I made a mark on a piece of paper if I go grab a bunch of mashed potatoes and leave mount let them dry did I make a sculpture no I made a mess you could argue that I'm making conceptual arts or contemporary art but even conceptual art has a thought process behind it so what makes photography creative is the idea of creative thinking and how are you approaching what you're doing or give you an example the artist series that I'm working on this year will have nine of those by the end of the year the first three are live now and if you look at the three artists that we've got up bill Wegman Alexi Teddy Renko and Laura Wilson even if you didn't know who they were and you just put their images out on a table you would see three very distinctive styles of photography well why is that different than the bulk of what's on Instagram or the internet where there's a lot of homogeneous photographs of similar things on their people's dogs or parties or whatever this is three distinctive well the difference is there is a lot of creative thinking a lot of intelligence and a lot of artistic ability that went into being the very best of the best which is what they are and so that is a key component to making photography a creative process if you can do that photography can be very creative and that is important to understand the difference the camera does not make pictures we make pictures and it comes from you it comes from within and that's really really important and if you look at any medium and I think it is important to look at other mediums it's important to get beyond photography sometimes and it's important to listen to music it's important to go to theatre go to movies read it's important to experience these things because if you lock yourself into the world of photography you have a distractions generated and to whom wonder what lens they used or what kind of camera was this shot with or why did they use that f-stop because the depth of feels too shallower you know you start to have all these technical details which are just technical details sure their tools and their choices that go into making a photograph but when you get outside of photography and into a different medium I think there's something that can be gained from that on a creative level where you don't have those distractions you strip that away and you're left with just the creative possibilities and that style of creative thinking and I think that's really important let me give you an example here and you're gonna have to hear me out on this I will not make this story too long but I think it's really important to my point here I have a friend who is a colleague and a very dear friend and he is Jewish and he called me a few weeks ago and he said he said hey my mom and I are going to do this show on Facebook come check it out well his mother is a rabbi she's extremely smart she's brilliant and I'm not Jewish but I went over there because I liked them and so I watched the show and it was very entertaining and basically the show is called ask a rabbi and it's an interactive show where you can type questions in and ask as the things going on so it's a two-way conversation and you know I was very entertained by this and I was watching it just the other day on Sunday they do this every Sunday the time differs but I'll put the link in the description if you're interested in checking it out but the video that they were doing or the little presentation the live thing they were doing was called lessons from the wilderness and if you're Jewish you'll know all this stuff but if you're not let me give you the gist of it so basically Moses goes and gets the Israelites out of Egypt and their bondage and slavery and he's to take them to the promised land well between slavery in the promised land you have this thing called the wilderness and in very poetic biblical fashion they use the number 40 to represent a long time and they are in the wilderness for 40 years the interesting thing though is that the wilderness is a period of transformation and it is metaphoric and it's something that we can apply to our lives in modern world and I'm sitting there watching her talk about this and I'm like this completely applies to creative thinking to photography to everything that we're striving to do in our lives we have something we've done in the past and we want to move forward where we're going to have to go through that transitional period in the wilderness and so she was talking about that and she said you know one of the first things that happens when they get into the wilderness is that people start complaining the food sucks there's not enough water they're uncomfortable they're out in the wilderness it's not really cool it's kind of like wearing on everybody and mentally they're kind of still stuck in the slavery era because they look back at that and they start to talk about the fish and they had food at least and it was better than what they're in now they feel like they've taken a step backwards and this is an important lesson to learn because in order to get beyond into something new into new territory that you want to handle you're going to have to go through this transformation the famous phrase that you hear all the time is what's the definition of insanity it's doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result so if in the past your creative thinking has been a system of two plus three equals five and five has been cool but now you really want to move up to ten or twenty well two and three ain't going to cut it and it could be that addition in giving a cut so you're going to have to figure out a different process to move forward anyway that's my my analogy but this is something this is a different meaning this isn't even really art necessarily although you could certainly make the case that there is an art fulness to it but this is a rabbi telling a story and talking about how something applies to our lives and I thought it was amazing because I'm not Jewish but it just really spoke to me because there are certain applications that I deal with where this makes perfect sense and it's a whole new style and system of thinking so coming back around to where I want to open the conversation and what I want your thoughts on are a couple things one would you find it interesting if I brought non photographers into this occasionally so this could be a collaboration video or maybe an interview I do with somebody who is not a photographer I've talked to gentleman who is a graphic designer in fact he's a very well-known graphic designer I think he would be wonderful and I know an artist that I know would do this so I think would be wonderful to that that would provide a little bit different perspective into what we're doing with these assignments that might push us in a new direction so I want to know one if you think that would be interesting too I want to know and there are no right or wrong answers here so I don't want two people to feel like they're going to say something that's silly or something like that there's nothing silly this is just I want to get a feel for what some of the stumbling blocks that you might have are and I'll give you some of the common ones that I hear so a lot of times people think well I get into a rut I get burnt out and I'm not inspired and how do I get out of that how do I get inspired again so that you know if that's you you can say that another one that I hear a lot is that well between family and my day job I really only have an hour for photography on the weekends so I really that is it seems to be one of my hang-ups is that I just have such limited time so that's a perfectly good summary of a problem you could have so I want to know what are some of the stumbling blocks that you guys have what I'm going to do with all this is I want to put this together into what these assignments are going to be and I really want these to be something that are unusual something that are different than anything you can find anywhere else there's a lot of stuff that you can find if you want to do critiques or if you want to go do photo assignments there are plenty of photo challenges out there I don't want to repeat that on this and I've kind of mentioned that before I want this to be something special something interesting and something that you guys get something out of anyway so let me know what you think if you've enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it subscribe to the art of photography so you'll be up-to-date on all the latest and greatest I will link up to my friend Jill's web stuff below check her show out it's awesome you can go watch the replays but it's probably more interesting to see while it's live because you can actually interact there's a lot of hey welcome to the room and stuff like that when you're watching it in retrospective so you might have to skip around but it's an excellent show they're very funny they're very good friends of mine and that's just something in my week that made me think a little bit differently so I'll see you guys in the next video till then later\n"