Have you ever struggled with being creative in your photography, but whatever you tried, it didn’t solve the problem? Artists think in a very particular way. Knowing how can change your photography in a big way.
In my latest YouTube video on how to be more creative by changing the way you think, I show our conventional way of thinking, why we think the way we do, the creative obstacles it faces. delivers, the way artists think the opposite, and we can all achieve that easily.
Something quite interesting: have you ever observed a three- to six-year-old child, how they interact with their environment? “Why is the sky blue, why is the grass green?” The child does not need all of that information at once to solve any problem. They are just things of interest. And this is the best basis for me to create according to my experience.
Our creativity is suppressed
It’s been almost 40 years, but I think I still remember the day I went to school. My father said things like, “Son, today the serious side of life begins with you.” And he was right.
Do you remember all the math problems like: “The Millers have three children and they received an apple tree from their neighbor with six apples on it. How many apples does each child get? In this lesson, we simply divide the number of apples by the number of children and each child gets two apples. We’ve learned to think analytically, but the point is: we do this all the time. Sometimes, there are different ways to get to the result, but in the end, it’s all about how to get from the starting point to the result.
The higher the level of education, the more productive we have to be at school. I remember teachers who didn’t even accept correct results. It is necessary to calculate it in a certain way. Honestly, I didn’t understand that back then. But I got it today: it’s all about making us as efficient as possible. We need that in our daily lives. But it has a toxic side effect: it kills our creativity. We started thinking like robots. And robots are rarely very creative, in my experience.
How do artists think?
We now know how most people are used to thinking. But what about artists? Consider the same math example I mentioned above. Of course, an artist can also solve that problem. They will also just divide the apples among the kids and will get the same result.
But let’s see what more artists can do with that mathematical example. For analytical thinking, only the number of apples and the number of children are relevant. But an artist can also ask other questions such as: what color are the apples? Do the kids like to eat apples? What about the parents? They don’t eat apples? And should they at least offer an apple to their neighbor, since they took the tree from him? Why did he give them the whole tree? We do not know all of these and they are not relevant to solving the analytical problem. But they may be suitable for the artist.
What is going on here? Although there is only one clear starting point and one clear goal in analytical thinking, the artist thinks in other ways, where the number of goals is unlimited, as are the points of departure. broadcast. Calculating how many apples each child will receive is not the only concern in an artist’s world. The goal of art is to create something new. This is even one of the basic requirements that we need to get a work of art. The artist becomes creative by asking seemingly unrelated questions. And that’s the key to being creative.
Our problem is this: we are so used to analytical thinking that most of our thought processes work exactly that way, at least in most areas of our lives. We’re used to being productive, we’re used to asking questions that help us solve analytical problems. Where has our creativity gone and how can we get it back?
How can we overcome our creative obstacles?
I often hear people say that they think they won’t be creative. But it’s inside all of us. We shouldn’t forget that we were all masters of creativity before we went to school and started dividing apples. This is when we ask questions like: “why is the snow white?” We stop to be interested in things that seem unrelated to any analytical problem.
There is an analytical and creative side to our brains. Whenever we calculate the apple, our analysis is working. And since we’re used to thinking that way, it’s easy for our creative thinking to be extinguished. The point is it’s not enough just trying to be creative when you’re taking pictures. You should try getting creative several times a day, at least for a few minutes.
In my experience, the most powerful method is to occasionally ask creative questions while you are solving an analytical problem. When I have to divide apples, like in the example above, I do this just to be sure, but I also ask questions like: what colors are they? What kind is that? How do they taste? In the end, this didn’t lead me to the analysis, but to a lot of other starting points and goals, and it allowed me to be creative, not limiting myself when I went outside of landscape photography for the first time. later, and not just one look at the obvious, so that I can finally go home with a masterpiece.
More tips on how to think like an artist and how to be more creative are revealed in the video above.
