Hi, I am Charlie Borland and welcome to my All About Photography newsletter. I have been a pro photographer for over 40 years and have a lot to share with you. Please join the photo adventure by subscribing to this reader-supported newsletter.
The Journey to Creative Photography
One of the greatest challenges for photographers is their creativity.
Think about that, we are all photographers because we all need to be creative.
Our creative pursuits can take us to the unknown, allow us to take an idea and create it, and go where only we imagine.
We are all individuals! We are all unique! We are all successful in our own way!
Consider the fact that nobody is better at being you than you! There is nobody better in this world at being me than me!
And when it comes to creativity, only I can develop my inner creativity and only you can do the same for yourself.
I want to be more creative!
There is no quick route to being more creative. There is no app for that. There is no magic wand that will make you an amazingly creative photographer with the wave of a wand. And nobody is born an incredible photographer.
There are You, Me, and many other creative persons who choose photography as their path, their creative calling. The choices we might make could be the realization that a different way of living, a more creative, fulfilling, and rewarding journey is our calling.
Photographers rarely do it for money. If they did, they might be disappointed. The U.S. Bureau of Labor shows the average photographer earns $26k a year. That's hardly motivation!
They get into photography for passion, not money. They do it because it's their calling. They do it because they created an amazing photograph and they are over the top with the results. They get some likes and thumbs up and tomorrow they will go create a new image. Rinse and repeat!
Creative photography is a learned skill and a skill that needs constant nurturing. I often refer to being a great photographer as a journey where the destination never comes into view. So the journey continues!
Think about it: You learned to walk because you had to.
You learned to drive a car because you likely needed to.
You became a photographer because you wanted to and needed to.
Most photographers who find creative success have done so after a lot of time and a lot of hard work. For some, being a successful photographer means creating images for somebody else.
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In some cases, your creativity may not be needed or even wanted because your client arrives at the photo shoot and tells you precisely how to photograph the subject, how to light it, and how to post-process it. This means you are simply a technician and that is okay because you still get paid and that payment allows you to pursue your own creative ambitions.
Demonstrate your creativity
Other times, you will have a client who completely trusts you, trusts your instincts, and your creative intuition. They will send you off to photograph and you will be expected to return with striking imagery.
One of my best clients EVER did just that for many years. I would photograph their corporate annual reports and we would have a meeting after meeting on the concept for that year, and the locations they wanted to photograph, and then I made arrangements with each location on what we would photograph upon arrival.
What I loved about these types of assignments was that I was told what they wanted photographed, but not HOW they wanted it photographed. I was free to interpret that assignment any way I wanted. Then, after pre-planning, my assistant and I would fly around the United States for several weeks, photographing somewhere different every day. Variety is the spice of life for photographers!
I got to this point, with this client, because I demonstrated my creativity by going beyond what they expected. They did not need to dictate what they wanted because I had shown this client, my creative vision and ability to capture amazing images for them.
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After the first two years (out of 10) as my client, the art director quit flying around with us because they trusted my creativity to capture what they wanted. They then gave me free rein to photograph every subject the way I wanted and my reward was to get paid handsomely.
Grow Yourself
This journey of growth through creativity is likely the same for other photographers like a National Geographic photographer who gets an assignment based on past work and the ability to creatively solve problems. As I mentioned previously, there is no quick path to get there. It is years and years of effort and working in a disciplined way and that means you do not just walk up and take a picture of each subject hurriedly.
Instead, it’s working methodically with every single subject and experimenting and testing and trying different approaches until your creativity has resulted in the image imagined. So where do you get your creativity?
Here is an example. I was told to go to a specific city and photograph a factory that rebuilt giant industrial pumps and this elevated view shows the pumps laying on the floor and this is how it looked in this plant every day. These pump casings were always lying on the floor.
I took a photograph of this scene because it was there and ready to photograph. But my enthusiasm did not last long when I began to feel that I could do much better because this scene did not make me say WOW and probably nobody else would think that either. I knew that my client used me year after year and expected me to be much more creative than this. They wanted to be blown away every time I delivered images to them.
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Fortunately, at this location, we had time to photograph numerous scenes so I dug into that creative department in my mind and asked myself 'How could I create an image that's much more powerful.' I did not walk around looking for something else to take a picture of.
After that inner search for an idea, I decided to build a photo that did not exist based on creative ideas. I came up with one and then sought out the floor manager to ask if they had any finished pumps and if they could stand them up.
Here is the photo I created. These are the same style pumps as the first photo but arranged in a setup that I imagined and that did not exist when I arrived.
There was nothing in this factory that triggered the idea for this photograph. But after walking around the plant and just observing, there was something inside my creative mind that triggered this idea and it likely came from decades of looking at all kinds of photography, every single day.
Pro photography is not a job. It's a lifestyle!
And I live that lifestyle by being immersed in all aspects of image-making and observing what others do. Eventually, things will stick in the mind. I delivered the images to my client, who had been to this plant before and knew what it looked like, and she was blown away.
When you think about the process of capturing a photograph, often consists of Composing the scene, Lighting it, then Focusing, Exposing the photograph, and later Processing the picture.
If you think about these things, which one can the camera NOT do? Think about that.
The camera can focus and expose the image but it cannot Compose a creative idea into a scene. Everything else the camera can do without you paying much attention but not the creative idea and composition.
When we think of creative photography, it is much more involved and includes Creative Vision, Visual Design, Technical and Creative Image Capture, and Expressive Image Processing.
To dig deeper into each of these, look at Creative Vision, which is finding a subject worthy of your time to photograph it. There must be something in your chosen scene that excites you, even if it is a dirty industrial pump. If you don’t see it you must create it!
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Visual design is how you compose the scene and here is where you do what I call: work the subject. This means walking around the subject viewing different angles, getting up high, getting down low, and digging and digging until you find a way to photograph the subject in a manner that excites you. That is how it went for me when I built the photo I just showed you.
Technical capture is letting the camera document the subject when you click the shutter. Creative capture is overriding the camera settings to capture the scene with things like lots of depth of field or very little. Or over-exposing the subject or underexposing to create a mood or exposure effect.
Expressive Processing
Expressive image processing is what you do on the computer to make your image more creative and here, often the sky is the limit depending on the subject and based on whom you are creating the image for.
More importantly, it is how you see these different approaches I just outlined. You can point and click your camera or you can dig deep into your creative mind and create something knowing full well that the first stage is creating a photograph that you like but the second stage is to create a photograph that others like and inspires people way beyond your reach, like those who view your magazine cover or the ad you photographed or a stock photo in a magazine.
Creative success is articulating a photograph that provides the viewer with a perception of what it was like when you created the photograph. Such as how cold it was when you captured the photo, how a styled food photograph makes the food look really tasty, or creating a photograph that shows a buyer what they will look like after they buy that colorful new running shoe.
Getting More Creative
So, to nurture your creativity, remember that we all learn the same basic rules of photography and those rules don’t change. Whether you are just beginning or well-established in professional photography, those rules are the same for everybody.
But once you throw in creativity, that is where we all are different. Each photographer will push their own limits and boundaries, break the rules they want to break and differentiate themselves from the crowds.
Success as a photographer is directly linked to the photographer’s creativity and how they use conscious manipulation of everything in the image creation process from equipment to capture settings, light, composition, and image processing. Creativity is pushing your limits to do what you may not have done before.
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To develop or stimulate your creative mind and develop your creative instincts, always observe others’ photographs everywhere you see them. Examine how others apply their creativity. Test yourself, try new things, choose unfamiliar subjects, work different angles, apply light as you have never tried before, and process your images in as many different ways as you can because once you start, you don’t know where you are going until you get there.
Keep shooting!
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Well-timed post for me! Loved it, thank you. I’m studying photography as an art at the moment. The struggle I have is to settle on an idea that is worth pursuing. I also second Matt Wolpin’s recommendation for Rick Rubin’s book!
“...the average photographer earns $26k per year.”
Which is ironic because this is by far the most expensive hobby I’ve ever had.