Learn to Be More Creative

Creativity - Exercises  Comment
0 Likes

audio_turqoise


Learn to Be More Creative
You can learn to be more creative. How? Let me count the ways! Try these five ways for starters. (You’ll find more tips like these in every issue of Insights.)
1 Acknowledge that you are creative and commit yourself to becoming even more creative.
2 Identify your habits; then, consistently and systematically challenge your habits.
3 Become more versatile by expanding your technical and perceptual skill sets.
4 Study ways that other people are creative; practice and adapt those ways to suit your needs.
5 Place yourself in stimulating environments that will prompt you to generate.
Find more Creativity resources here.
Stimulate your creativity in my workshops.

Variations

Creativity, Creativity - Storytelling, Magazine  Comment
0 Likes


Here’s an excerpt from my article in the current issue of After Capture magazine.
“Once you’ve identified the core concerns, strengths, and weaknesses a body of work your path becomes clearer. Stick to your strong points; repeat them. Eliminate or minimize weaknesses. Introduce small variations of less essential items to add life, complexity, and nuances to the work. Enrich text with subtext. Make a list of possible variations upon the elements that you’ve identified. Consider, different points of view and different combinations of elements. Keep adding to your list as time goes on. It’s likely you’ll generate many more ideas than you can accomplish in a short time. With these options in mind you’ll never run out of ideas to pursue. Pursue only the very best ideas; let the lesser ideas pass you by. How do you evaluate new ideas? Ask yourself some questions. How much repetition leads to saturation (adding more information without adding anything new)? How much variation can you support without losing track of the essential idea and starting a new one? Does including a variation reinforce or distract from the entire body of work and its theme? If it reinforces it, include it. If it distracts from it, set it aside for another use. Quite often these images can start new bodies of work. They can even serve as bridges between related bodies of work. Engaging this process consciously increases the likelihood that you will produce the more significant results both now and in the future. You’ll know what to move forward on and when to move forward. You’ll know what to defer and when to defer it so you don’t get sidetracked …”
Find my PDFs on Creativity here.
Learn these and other core concepts in my workshops.

BillAtkinson.com – A Great Resource

Printing  Comment
0 Likes


Bill Atkinson, one of the original authors of the Mac interface and color management expert, offers excellent free resources on his website. His website is so rich you might miss the free color management resources he makes available – targets, profiles, test files. In particular his Profile Test Images file is excellent for evaluating inks, papers, and profiles objectively. These resources are excellent. I recommend them to all of my workshop and seminar participants. I recommend them to you too.
Find the downloads here.
Find out more about Bill here.
Check out his book here.
Check out his photographs here.
Want more? Check out my free downloads here.

Survivor

Images - Photographs, Images - Statements  Comment
0 Likes


“How much do you sacrifice? What’s best left included? What’s better left out? That sums up the whole photographic process for me. It’s about what survives and what doesn’t.

This image is like a poem. There’s a lyrical quality to it. There are echoes and rhymes within it. Though one is dark and one is light, the shape of the cloud is similar to the shape of the tree. The darkest and lightest values are linked through shape. The eye travels back and forth between the two. The common language found in their contours sets up a visual dialogue between the two. The image is bathed in a warm light, almost red, an appropriate color for both the earth and a heart. The limbs of the tree branch out contained within the body of stone, like veins. The image breathes. While there may be only a few visible signs at first, still, life persists, even in wastelands …”

Read the rest of this Statement here.

Read more Statements here.

Increasing Color Accuracy

Color - Theory  Comment
0 Likes


Can color accuracy be increased? Yes. In many ways. Targets like gray cards and color checkers can help to a limited degree; they’re useful in idealized lighting situations (5000K) but not others (the gray card isn’t gray in the ‘golden hours’ – it’s golden). Add ambient light readings (amount, temperature, spectral distribution) for more precision. Written observations on site about colors and color relationships can help too, if the language used to describe color is precise. (I recommend LHS.) And, onsite verification and adjustment; compare the image made with the subject at the time of capture.
Find out more in my downloads , DVDs, and workshops.

Precise Language Leads to Better Perception

Color - Theory  Comment
0 Likes


A precise language for color (LHS)(Luminosity-Hue-Saturation) can increase not only the precision of color communication but also color observations. There are too many flavors of RGB and CMYK. Lab takes too much calculation. But LSH is a great language conceptually (and you see it in the interfaces of Lightroom and Photoshop). Luminosity and Saturation are both specified on a scale of 1-100. On a scale of 1-10 (10 high) how light or saturated is a given color? Now multiply by 10. Simple. Hue is more challenging because it’s plotted as a color wheel or circle with 360 degrees. 0 is cherry red. Add 30 degrees to the next color family (30 is orange, 60 is yellow, 90 is yellow green, 180 is cyan, etc). Learn this one variable and you’ve got a new language for color which is precise and simple enough to use. (Or you can memorize all the numbers in the Pantone swatchbook.) You can quickly learn to specify these numbers within plus or minus 10%. That’s a lot more accurate than linguistic observations. What color is mauve? How green is seafoam? You’ll also find that better language leads to better perception. Learn this language and you’ll begin to see color more precisely.
Want proof? The color above is 50/0/100 in LHS.
Now go mix that color in Photoshop.
Enter the values into the Color Picker in the HSB field.
Find out more in my downloads , DVDs, and workshops.

Color Memory is Fluid

Color - Physics/Biology, Color - Psychology, Color - Theory  Comment
0 Likes


A lot of photographers set an objective to match color the way they remember it. But how reliable is their color memory? Not very.
Try this. Look at this color. Then hide it. Mix it in Photoshop. Then compare your results with the original. Were you too light or dark, warm or cool, saturated or desaturated? Do this with 50 different colors and you’ll start to be able to identify consistent errors, which indicates your color tendencies and preferences.
Find out more in my downloads , DVDs, and workshops.
See the results my workshop students generated this week. Read More