“Mother Superior is stifling my creative flow.”
Did anyone watch The Trouble with Angels when they were a kid? One of my favorites! You can’t beat Haley Mills in a Walt Disney classic : )
This post is all about ways to get creative with your camera. It’s really easy to get bogged down in a bunch of photography rules and forget that it is an art form. Don’t block your creative flow by worrying so much about what is “right” and think out of the box!
What are some ways to get creative with my camera?
My favorite way to get creative is in Manual mode (usually the “M” on your DSLR). Light can be your greatest friend and your worst enemy in photography, so this is a way to manipulate light and therefore get some great images. (See previous posts on how to manipulate the settings to get the correct exposure to your shots.) By playing with light, you can get a dark foreboding picture, or a washed out over-exposed photo…even those they may not be “technically” correct, they can be great works of art.
If you don’t have a DSLR and can’t play with manual settings, try to manipulate the light around your subject to get a great shot. Use colored lighting, or diffuse light through a white sheet. Bounce light off of a mirror or a white wall onto your subject and see what you come up with…anything goes! It is also very interesting to use different sources of light like flashlights, computer monitors, cell phone glows, candles, the possibilities go on and on. Sunset is a great time to go out and get beautiful silhouettes and warmly lighted shots.
Another way to get creative is in post production of your photos. In Photoshop, you not only can manipulate the lighting in the photo, but you can also put filters over the photo to change the texture and finish. It is amazing what this program is capable of, but it is very difficult to learn.
If you are in the market for a new computer and are thinking about purchasing Photoshop, I recommend getting a Mac and purchasing the “One to One” sessions. It is really inexpensive, and you can get a lesson once a week for a year on anything you want, including Photoshop. It is a great way to get the basics down. After that, another great place to get instruction is YouTube. There are thousands of tutorials on Photoshop and photography in general. There are many other websites that offer a lot of instruction like CafeMom.com, DigitalPhotographySchool.com, and CoffeeTeaPhotography.blogspot.com.
Here are a couple of ways that I have needed to use Photoshop to get creative…
