Why "play" is important

By Rick Walker | September 6, 2009 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0)

A lot of times we get wrapped up in the seriousness of photography.  We want to get things as sharp as possible, the colors or tones exactly the way we want them, and the composition perfect.  Those sound like good aspirations, and sometimes they help make the shot.  Unfortunately, that same seriousness can keep you from growing as a photographer.

A lesson that we should take from children is that "play" is often one of the best ways of learning.  In our recent podcast interview (episode #99) with Julieanne Kost of Adobe (www.jkost.com/index.html), we briefly touched on the idea of playing around with new features in software programs as a way of learning.  We even got a bit serious and suggested the idea of a self-assignment where you deliberately devote time to exploring a specific feature or technique.  The concept was to force yourself out of patterns you may have inadvertantly settled into over time - patterns that lead you to getting bored with your work.  I think it's a great idea.

You can go much broader, though.  Consider the idea of injecting "play" into other aspects of photography as well.  Try things that have a high risk of failure such as motion blur, multiple exposures, extreme lighting, HDR, non-traditional uses of flash - you name it.  Most probably won't work out, but some will, and those that do will increase the number of techniques in your photographic toolkit.  In some cases, existing images that just didn't quite work as straight images may work well using wilder post-processing approaches.  You may come to the conclusion that what seemed "wild" is now part of your standard repertoire.  Having expanded your horizons, your existing library of images can now take on new life and marginal shots can become your masterpieces. 

A personal example for me has been using Nik Color Efex plug-ins (www.niksoftware.com).  While I've had them for some time, I really didn't use them a lot.  I admired their breadth and diversity, but only used a couple of them, and even those weren't used that often.  I gave myself an assignment and permission to get a litttle crazy and used them extensively on several recent shoots.  Instead of just trying the initial defaults and seeing if I liked the results or not, I forced myself to use some of the filters and played extensively with the settings and values (and there are a large number of them).  What I found is that filters I previously ignored can produce results I really like, and that's led to an expansion of my photographic style.  Not everyone may like the results, but I like them, and when I get around to it, some might even find their way onto my website.

So, here's your assignment for the next month: devote some time to pure photographic play, whether it's while you're shooting or when you're post-processing your images.  It could even involve going through years-old images and creating new interpretations of them.  That bit of play could end up expanding your volume of photographic work.

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