I recently spoke to a camera club about what creativity is, why we freeze when we need to be creative, and how we can improve our creativity. Based on my reading of a variety of scientific papers, popular psychology articles, “self-help” books and articles, writings by photographers and other artists, and my own experience, I came to the following conclusions:
- Creativity is a combination of inspiration and perspiration, i.e., thinking it AND doing it. You can have the best idea ever for photographing the Grand Tetons but, if you don’t take the picture, you can hardly claim to have been creative because you created nothing!
- We generally don’t fail at creativity. We simply don’t recognize when we are creative, e.g., changing a recipe to make it more to our liking or putting together a deal at the office. When we do fail, it is most often because we fear failure or criticism. A corollary to this is: Everyone is creative.
- To improve our ability to be creative, it takes practice, practice, and more practice both within our chosen genre and outside it. If you are a nature photographer, take portraits to improve your creativity; if you are a portraitist, photograph some flowers or landscapes. Familiarity breeds complacency.
So, what does creativity have to do with gear and technique? Everything! While some might say that vision or creativity is everything. I simply can’t agree. If you have the vision for a photograph but don’t have the technique or the equipment to make the image, you can’t really be creative because you can’t turn that vision into reality.
My approach to the question of vision, technique, and gear is more nuanced than most. I think that any one of them can be more important than another depending on the image and what you want to accomplish with the image. While creativity is important in all images, gear can be too. Some wildlife images, particularly of birds, simply require long glass and, without it, some images are just impossible or nearly so.
Don’t get me wrong here! I believe that creativity is the heart and soul of any photograph, particularly a great one, e.g., Moon over Half Dome. However, let’s not forget technique, e.g., lighting, and gear, e.g., wide-angle lenses for landscapes, are sometimes necessary to the creative process.
