Where do you find your inspiration? Do you find it in the light like Kristina? Maybe you get your inspiration from your favorite movie like Fathers Figures? Maybe you find it on your “to-do” shelf like Brett? Or maybe you need a little direction to help jumpstart your inspiration like me?
Inspiration One Card at a Time
The Bigger Picture came out with a deck of cards designed to help improve your photography through a series of simple challenges. By randomly choosing one of the 40 task cards and pairing it with one of the 10 ‘knowledge cards’ you come up with a unique challenge to help you focus your creativity.
Limitations can be an excellent way to stimulate the imagination. Personally I love to solve problems. I love to turn over a photographic problem in my head until I find a potential solution. By putting up road blocks, I force myself to think beyond grabbing that easy photo. What I like about these cards is that they’re encouraging me to explore photographic styles I might not approach AND think about the structure of the photo.
Any tool that helps me to think about my work, can only help me to get better.
In the past Kristina and I did a series of photo challenges around The Photographers Playbook. I found that by completing these challenges my work took huge steps forward; both in meaning and underlying concepts. I have no illusions that these cards will have similar results. But I will be honest, I’m having trouble focusing right now. I’m looking forward to setting up artificial boundaries to help me to think about my work. Hopefully I will create a few interesting images along the way. 🙂
The Bottom Line
Please consider joining Brett and I during the month of March. We’ve chosen to focus on Silhouettes and Golden Ratio.
In photography, a silhouette is defined as an outline that appears dark against a light background. More specifically, it is where your subject is seen as a black shape without detail against a brighter background. – Silhouette Photography by Trisha Leung
I invite everyone to create silhouettes of your toys in March. You can post them to G+, The G+ Toy Photographers Community or Instagram and use our tag #toy_photographers.
Together we can find inspiration one card at a time.
Shelly
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It’s interesting because I’ve been playing with silhouettes in the past two weeks while looking for a way to not get bored with all the snow. I’ll definitely post some of them in the coming weeks 😉
…and you thought you would be able to play along! I knew this would be an easy none for you! I look forward to seeing your submissions! 🙂
I did a lot of silhouettes at a toyphoto meet-up in Hamburg, quite fun 🙂
When you get up for the sunrise, it’s a natural to create a silhouette. What happens when you try to create one and it’s not sunrise or sunset? Do you think its possible? Do you think the choice of mini figure is important? Also, would you do it again? 🙂
“Silhouettes” and the “rule of thirds”? For once cards have been kind to me. Maybe I should rush to the casino? I’m excited about this challenge. And, it ties in nicely with my next post. See, the cards do like me! 😀
I think like the Trump administration, we’re running like a well oiled machine! Bwahahahah!
I love the idea of silhouettes as a theme for March! I hope I can come up with some photos 🙂
Lynn
Lynn, I hope you will be inspired to participate. It will be interesting to see how we each approach the same challenge. 🙂
I can already imagine the results: your photos will be serene and beautiful and my minifigs will be hyperactively doing something 🙂 lol……