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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