Creativity Article and Candid Portraits

This week I came across a good article on the topic of creativity. This is something I try to write on and then only in specific areas. As far as I know there are no perfect formulae that all of a sudden will make you creative.

Being creative is mainly about doing. Doing things that help the creative ideas flow and at the same time reduce the interruptions or burdens of everyday life that wants you to be robotic. There are many people whose daily job it is to be creative and even these people I know have to practice at making the creative juices flow.

This linked article may seem a bit long at 49 pages, but I found the writing style enjoyable and with the added bonus of his comical drawings on the back of business cards, it increases the extra entertainment factor. There are many good ideas contained within and where there is a slant towards the advertising industry, it is relevant to photographers and other artists. I would encourage you to read it and pass it along to any others that you think might enjoy it.


Update: I inadvertently included the wrong blog as the source for the link. The article was from Pixelatedimage blog as the link can be found here and Chris Brogan is still a good read.

Chris Brogan’s blog is one of my regular reads. His blog deals with social media and community mainly at the corporate level but it is easy to extract material for our business and personal levels. I think it is important that being a photographer or any artist, that we explore more about business, people and customers.

The article I had originally planned was to deal with shooting completely black objects so now I have an article ready for next week. Feels good to be ahead.

I love this photo on many levels. First and foremost the expression of sheer wonder is what grabs you. If you take the time for a closer look you will see that red is the dominant colour, The red glasses, red chair and the pink bathing straps as well as the dark red in the background all help to re-enforce colour dominance. This is complimented with the green hat and also with its analogous colour of cyan in some of the background and with the reflection of water in her face and the lettering on the lens strap.


To many of my regular readers you are probably aware that most of my images are either landscape or inanimate objects and people rarely are the primary focus. This week I decided to show some of my pure people images.

In this image the colours on the shirt are balanced out with same colours in the background. In this shot I had the lions head on the background wall line up with the boys’ own wild main.

I had noticed the boy and his parents early in one of the rings around the street performers and when they started to leave I asked him and his parents if I might take a few shots. They were pleased by my offer.

A street party or event and this case both since it was a Buskers festival becomes a photo-rick area for getting lots of people in interesting images

The main focal point of this image is clearly the interaction between the 2 women obviously enjoying a good laugh. I removed the lower portion of the dining table as its clutter only detracted from the focal point. I also converted to B&W, as I did not want any background colours to lend the eye away. B&W does a good job of removing extraneous detail and clutter, especially when they are colorful



There are strong focal points for eye movement from first the eyes and then mouth, finger over to flower and then up to highlight on the top of head. I decided to leave in the tiny highlight on top of his head to ensure that you take in his whole portrait and take away from those intense eyes.

When I gave him my images of the evening’s event, both he and his wife enjoyed my images more than the professional wedding photographer.

While there is a pleasing smile, I really enjoy the brown tones.



Addiction Hint:

You know when you’re either addicted to photography or seriously challenged when you take photos of your own wedding. This was the case for me. During the actual ceremony I handed my camera to my son, but I took the before & after ceremony shots plus some group shots. This was an outdoor civil ceremony in the gardens and a fine hotel that night.



Niels Henriksen