Where do you find your Inspiration?

I am sure that everyone of us goes through this dilemma. What gets you going? How do you find the photographs that you need? How can you just start photographing again?

No it is not just about picking up a camera and starting to photograph. That sounds so much like snapshots to me and that is not what I am referring too.

Last week I had a really tough week. I had to find suitable subject matter for my final project, work was crazy and my son landed up in hospital. Not a good week for me.I really did not feel like photographing at all and to be honest all I wanted to do was curl up into a small ball and sleep for a month.

Well that was not going to happen! So how did I get my spark for photography back? Well, that is a really fun thing to do for me. I cannot say that it will work for you but here are a few things that I did that forced me to get my camera out again and start photographing once again. It is really ground breaking stuff so I think you might need to write this down. Here it is!

I went for a walk.

Yup, that is what the ground breaking thing was. All I did was put all my digital devices in a draw at home and I jumped into my car and went for a walk at one of my favorite spots. Now you must be thinking how this would help the creative process. Remember I had no intention of photographing so I was open to the beauty and surroundings of the walk. I think it was my subconscious that was in charge on that walk because as a photographer, as many of you are aware, you see compositions in so many different ways.

You are aware of line, texture, shape and form. You are also aware of tonal ranges and perspective. These are the things we often take for granted when we are photographing because of muscle memory. In most cases it is your brain and fingers working in tandem to formulate all this information into your own master pieces. By been open to just the walk I started seeing all the beauty around me. My muscle memory immediately noticed all these patterns, colors and textures. So my immediate reaction is to reach for my camera. Well it is not there. Remember I left it all at home because I did not want to photograph. So I had to return later that same day to capture that which I had seen. I had gotten my mojo back!

It is the passion that gets me up in the morning. It is the medication that gets me through those tough days of sick children and awful hospital visits. It is the tonic for finding final project themes.

So spend some time without your camera and it might just be the solution you were looking for.

Here are a few photographs from my 3 hour walk.

Have a great week and I will speak to you again next week.

Denzil

Black & White Photography

I have had questions from students about the best way to do B&W photography. Is it better to do it in camera or using post processing software such as Photoshop, Lightroom or another similar program?

Different people will give different answers to this question, and there is no “right” answer to this question. Anytime you can do things in camera, it is considered the “ideal” way to do it but you have more flexibility using editing software.

Your camera can make fantastic B&W images but there is a catch, you have to shoot in JPEG only, because if you shoot RAW, the images will appear B&W when viewing them in the camera but once downloaded to your computer they will revert back to full color because RAW format records ALL details and pixels. I’ve had students ask, “what if I don’t have or cannot afford editing software?” Well, first of all, if you are a student at AI, you should have editing software as part of your degree program.

Shot in JPG using Monochrome Picture Style on my Canon 6D

Shooting B&W in camera will give you beautiful B&W images but since you are shooting JPEG, ALL extra data for your image will be discarded and gone forever, you cannot get that back. I, and most professional photographers will tell you it’s best to ALWAYS shoot in RAW for the very best image quality and then convert them to B&W. This gives you the most creativity and best detail in your final image. By editing to B&W in say Lightroom, there are a couple ways you can do it. You can use the Black & White option under the development module, or I prefer to use the Saturation tool and de-saturate the colors from the image, then tweak the contrast to create a more dramatic effect.

Shot in RAW on my Canon 6D and de-saturated in Lightroom

There are also nice third party apps and plug-ins you can use and I personally use quite a few of them to get my images just the way I want them. The NIK Collection is one of my favorites and comes with a great B&W plug-in called Silver Efex Pro 2. This software has a nice set of “recipes” for making different types of B&W images with varying looks, from High Key to Low Key and heavy contrast just to name a few.

Shot in RAW with Canon 6D and then converted using "Antique Plate 1" using NIK Collection

For any friends you have that are into photography and cannot afford Lightroom or Photoshop, there is a free, Open Source photo editor called GIMP, which is available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. http://www.gimp.org GIMP is nice as it has ALL of the capabilities of Photoshop with no cost.
Now that you have more information on how to make great B&W images, get out there and make some great ones!

Comments/Questions