New Habits
Tim Bruce has a very cool Substack, Creative for Creatives, and what he recently proposed in Everyone says to generate 3 ideas resonates beautifully with how I think in photography.
Okay, happy disclaimer. Tim has designed my websites, the SEE THINK DO Photo Cards, a Kickstarter campaign, both Taproot creative conferences, and continues to be a valuable and fun partner on our creative journeys.
As a workshop exercise I will read a line from a poem, and then let students explore interpretations. There are no right answers, as the goal is to push past the way you always make a photograph. To go into new territory.
In Walt Whitman’s “Song of a Redwood-Tree”, he wrote the line “murmuring out of its myriad leaves”.
My mind begins to explore how I could respond photographically . . .
I could go out on a windy day, put my camera on a tripod, and press the shutter as a big gust roars through.
I could take the camera off the tripod, and in lower light, which would afford a longer shutter speed, move the camera in a murmuring kind of way.
Or, since my camera lets me make many multiple exposures on the same frame, I could build up the exposures to feel like the wind.
Not long ago, driving over a mountain pass, I played with creating wind-like images through the window, while moving.
All four photographs are sketches, experiments to celebrate Whitman’s idea of murmuring.
Over on Tim’s post, I resonated with one big takeaway he gave for creating three or more ideas. It is about cultivating the habit of creative thinking as your new norm. If I start to internalize an exploratory and open way of thinking, my photographs, or writing, or pottery, or choice of how to walk my neighborhood, will be endlessly rich. Fresh for me, and hopefully for those I reach.