CREATIVE PHOTO PROJECT IDEAS — 7 Tips

you own a camera you own lenses you own flashes and accessories you have the skills you know how to use light you apertures sorry one second okay so this video is sponsored by hassle blood have sent me an x2d 100c medium format camera in exchange for making a video for them now regular viewers to this channel will know that I don't normally do this sort of thing but hassle blood have given me a loot of creative freedom and they're literally letting me make the video I was already making so uh I thought that sound like a good deal so um I'm going to be using this camera in the video it's not a review video but I will share some thoughts on the camera towards the end of the video in case anyone's interested anyway back to the video so you own a camera you own lenses you own flashes and accessories you have the skills you know how to use light you know how apertures work you understand shutter speed and ISO you know how to compose a frame you know how to edit and process your images but there's one thing missing and it's arguably the most important thing in your photography what do you take photographs of oh such a nice day we've had like a month of rain is my local park I will never Tire of this view it's amazing up here a few years ago I got put on the waiting list for a liver transplant if you want to know a bit more about that you can watch this video on my channel entitled why I Disappeared how bur's advice changed my attitude this one but this means I could be called up anytime night or day and I'd need to go straight to the hospital for the operation so I stopped taking on most photographic jobs because I can't risk getting them call the morning of someone's wedding and then letting them down on the most important day of their lives but without photographic purpose I was left feeling a bit demotivated cuz taking shots of your life of your family of your friends it's nice but it's fairly useless Beyond personal keepsakes which are of course valuable in their own right but while you may get the ob one to post to Instagram you'll unlike make a book out of them you'll unlikely put on an exhibition without a focus your photography can end up feeling a bit aimless because creativity is in essence another word for problem solving whether that problem is something very practical like a creative storage solution for a small living space or something more conceptual and Abstract like a piece of media that evokes a feeling for an audience problems are really the fuel tool of creativity it's difficult to be creative when you have complete Freedom when you don't have a brief to follow confines you don't have rules that you have to work within it's those boundaries that constrict us that help us think creatively those limitations they drive us to explore unconventional methods or combine existing ideas in novel ways and boundaries also narrow down the possibilities which helps us avoid things like decision paralysis and it for es us to explore the only available options but to a much deeper level of creativity and insight so when we find ourselves faced with no problems to solve it's good to construct our own boundaries and one way we can do that is by setting ourselves a project there are multiple benefits of starting a project firstly you'll start to see images everywhere even when you don't have a camera in your hand because you'll be thinking about it all the time it's also a great way to build up a portfolio and that can help attract clients collaborators Publishers but it also teaches you how to curate what images to put next to each other what order to put them in what to leave in what to take out these are all important skills but how do you come up with a good project idea well there's no one simple answer to this but here are seven tips to help you get started number one go with your gut one of the best ways to find a project is to simply just start shooting without overthinking let your subconscious mind just drive and go out and take photographs of anything that catches your attention and trust your instincts if something feels interesting to you just photograph it and if you do this consistently for a few weeks then you look at what you've shot you may see a pattern or a theme starting to emerge and you might not know immediately what it is about that interests you but keep going with it because a key memory

for me is back when I was at University in 2001 and I'd become really obsessed with taking photographs of the sky so I went to my tutor and I showed him what I've been doing and I said I'm not sure why I'm doing this I'm not sure if I should keep doing it and I expected him to tell me to give it up to get on with my other projects but he said no keep doing it keep going there will be a reason you're doing it you just need to find it and it turned out there was a reason it was all based around my traveling to New York uh around the time of 9/11 and how the context of images of the sky had changed and how we ascribe meaning to the seemingly meaningless based on our own preconceptions and the media that surrounds us but that's as story for another time really my point is that the process isn't necessarily a linear progression of Concepts leading to image making it can be a bit more fluid than that but basically don't overthink it number two keep it personal so ask yourself what matters to me what am I passionate about your best work will come from a place of honesty so don't try and second guess what you think other people want to see make something that is authentically you and if you're passionate about it will resonate with an audience number three you don't have to travel so while going somewhere new or far away can give you a load of motivation it's also easy to overlook what's right under your nose so try learning a bit more about your local area talk to local people find out their stories look closer at those things that you pass every day cuz there's always more to learn about places that you think you know well maybe you could try focusing on a more emotively driven approach as well so how does your local area make you feel what do you love about it what frustrates you about it what amuses scares you about it maybe your project is less about the literal interpretation of an area and more about a feeling or a state of mind Sophia Copper's 2003 movie Lost in translations Springs to mind here cuz while Tokyo is the setting the film isn't so much about Tokyo as it is about Scarlet Johansson's character and how she feels about being there number four let the subject lead so try to avoid being overly influenced by the work of other photographers or forcing a preconceived aesthetic focus on the concepts and themes of your projects first let the subject dictate the form of your images this approach will keep your images authentic and unique number five don't keep it secret you really don't need to be secretive don't worry about people maybe trying to copy you um they might try but there's two things firstly if you publicly announce something you can always prove that you had the idea first but more importantly let them use your idea they'll likely do something very different because we all think in different ways great art can rarely be copied because it's so much about the artist and sharing a projects can invite really valuable feedback people can help you find more things for your projects subjects locations discussions about your project may help you realize new ideas the more you engage with others the more knowledge you can gather and the more it will enrich your own work number six don't rush it take it slowly the advantage of working to your own brief is that you don't need to rush stuff out so you can take your time you can leave things and come back to them later you may find that you start to lose motivation after a while and that's okay just step away examine why you've lost your drive Don't force yourself to carry on when you're not feeling it if you're bored when you're making the work it's likely that your audience will be bored when they're looking at the work because I do think passion communicates so maybe just try changing what you're doing for a bit this could be something within the project it could be working on a different project you can always come back to stuff later many well respective photographers have projects that span years and decades number seven research so while I advocated to draw your influence from real things rather than other photographers work it is a good idea to spend some time looking at the projects that other photographers have done and try getting off the internet to do this look at photography books cuz that's where some of the best projects can be found I got this book the other day um this Pleasant land published by hawton press it's the work of 24 different photographers and their take on the British landscape there's a load of great projects in here if you study photographic books you can see how the projects are curated you can read about the thought behind them the process they went through and this will help you devise and refine your own ideas so it's all very well for me to dish out these tips but can I go and find a project myself so I've got a deadline from hassleblad togethers video out so I'm just going to start a project

not looking to finish it but let's see what I can do so I've been working on a project for just over a year called Time and Tide I've talked about it a bit on my channel before and it's about Nature's omnipresence and how whatever we build becomes subject to entropy and ultimately gets reclaimed by nature but that's a project I'm doing on a 590 nanometer infrared camera and I don't quite feel like wrenching the hot mirror off the sensor in this camera just yet so I'm looking for something new so what are my boundaries so I'm not really able to travel to Exotic foreign lands at the moment due to health care issues and child care responsibilities and it's November in the UK and the weather has been cold and wintry and gray and depressing for weeks lots of rain lots of drizzle a bit of mist I'd like it to be summer I'd like to be somewhere else but I'm not so let's take these things as creative boundaries hassleblad also offered me one lens with the camera so I picked the 55 mm which is around a 43 mil equivalent in fullframe terms cuz that sounded like a good allrounder to me and I like doing environmental portraits and I thought that would be a kind of appropriate focal length so I suppose that becomes another creative boundary so I went out and I started taking some shots I took some portraits I took some other random shots went to London had a walk around so two things jumped out to me in terms of potential projects firstly these kind of unintentional still lives it was just something I found interesting about them these chairs especially I liked how the third one out of the four was different and this is an arrangement technique I see in photographs sometimes such as this Joel mywit shot here that was in the tape we've got these four guys and this third guy along is facing the other way to the others but I was looking for something that played a bit more into the weather and the other potential project I had from my initial shoot was inspired by this deserted shot of a BS green that I took in my local park I kind of like how the Mist in The Emptiness makes a slightly unsettling quality I talked about this before there's something about the spaces designed for people when no people are there they become slightly unknown iring so I decided to go down to a park that I used to go to when I was a kid to see if there was anything in the sort of deserted nature of the parks of this time of year these cold Misty Days and this park is very wareness and it has a railway line and a canal running through it and I have memories of going down to the walkway by the railway tracks and it feeling very quiet and creepy when I was a kid I decided to shoot these images in black and white and I'm not normally a black and white shooter but I like the idea of the images having a slightly Timeless feel to them there's something about the absence of color that adds to that sense of Stillness for me so I shot some scenes of this deserted Park and it also looks at some textures and some abstract shots to kind of balance out the wider scenes I really like the way this Corinthian column mirrors the tree in this shop but after a while I felt like I ran into a bit of a dead end and I gave some feedback on these and people said they didn't find them that interesting so I gave it up um I'd be interested to know what you think of these if you have an opinion on these shots leave me a comment was I right to drop this project or do you think I should have kept going with it I honestly don't know anyway I parked this project no pun intended and I started looking for something completely different so there's an area that's about an hour's drive from my house called aen mouth and it's on the outskirts of the City of Bristol and it's situated where the mouth of the river a meets the 7 EST and historically it's been an industrial and Port area serving as one of the key gateways for shipping in logistics to the UK um but a lot of that industry has since shut down and there's a lot of rundown and abandoned old factories and warehouses but what's really interesting about this area is that it's also residential there's a community there and that Community feels somewhat neglected cuz it's kind of off from the rest of the city by the M5 Motorway it feels a bit like a lost Village that's been swallowed by this industry around it so I went there to take some photos I felt there was something more interesting here something to be discovered it felt very Bleak this is a shot of seven Beach if you can find me a more depressing looking Beach I'll be impressed I think the bleakness of this area really comes through in these photos but I was wondering how to

make them a bit more Dynamic so another thing about this time of year is how little daylight we get it gets dark so early so I was thinking why not use that as a creative boundary cuz another thing this camera does is it shoots in hasselblad's panoramic xan ratio and that's pretty far out of my comfort zone cuz I'm generally in sort of 8x10 kind of ratio person normally so I saw that as a challenge and I went back at night to take some long exposure xan panoramas of the area lucky this isn't completely terrifying I was quite happy with how these shots were turning out we've got all these shots of the factories the industrial plants The Docks but we've also got these little streets where you have houses and pubs and takeaways but with these huge industrial structures just towering over them I think this one's my favorite shot I really like the leading line and how this Suburban scene kind of transforms into this huge industrial plant that's kicking out of this smoke with these bright lights I only spent a few hours there so I think I might go back at another time see if I can get some more of these panoramas and I've also arranged to go down to the community commity Center and take some portraits of some of the residents down there I don't yet know how this photography project is going to finally manifest itself but I think in starting this I've at least found an interesting subject the starting new photographic projects has really rekindled a sense of purpose in my photography it's really brought a level of excitement to my process and it's brought a kind of clarity to the creative direction of my work cuz when we work on a project even if none of the shots make it into the final cut the process itself has inherent value because it enhances our skill set it sharpens up our conceptual thinking and you never know while you're doing this you may just find a really truly brilliant and inspiring project so I'm going to talk about the hassleblad camera a bit now not because hassleblad asked me to but because I know I'll get a lot of questions about it and although Hasselblad sponsored this video by giving me the camera I've not been asked to say anything specific so these are all my own thoughts and opinions the reason I'm doing this little caveat is because I don't normally do camera reviews on this channel and that's not because I don't like Gear reviews or I don't think they're valuable but it's because I think there's enough of them on YouTube already and I do think cameras are important because it's important to find the camera that fits you that fits your shooting that fits your budget that gives you the look you want in your images and this will be different for everyone so please take this information as subjective to me and not necessarily applicable to you ultimately photography is about the photos and you need to just get there by whatever means work for you and if you're bothered about what camera systems other people are shooting on then uh get a life okay so cards on the table I obviously need to earn an income to support myself and my family and when Hass blad offered to send me this camera I thought okay well I'll make a video with it and then I'll sell it because I already have a Fuji gfx system I'm very happy with and that will be my income for this video but plot twist I'm now ebaying the Fuji stuff and I'm keeping the hassleblad wasn't expecting that so why am I keeping this not the Fuji primarily and this may sound superficial it's just so nice to shoot with it's probably the most beautiful camera I've ever used the ergonomics and Aesthetics are so welld designed the menu system the touchcreen it's the best I've ever used on any camera it's all those little details and it just makes for a really enjoyable shooting experience this may sound like a rather vacuous choice but it's the thing that makes me want to shoot with the camera it pick it up and cameras are such a personal thing and this just it just feels right for me it's also incredibly compact for medium format system if you look at this uh Canon apsc uh camera here and the hassle blood they're are kind of about the same size it's all metal it feels really robust but it's not overly heavy and the grip's really comfortable to hold so I had no issue holding it walking around all day cuz the image quality is outstanding I just I love that Medium format look and one thing that particularly blew me away with this camera I wasn't expecting was

the inbody image stabilization I've never had a camera with stabilization as good as this so check out this test shot I took it was a long exposure of 7 Seconds this was handheld for 7 Seconds that's a long time this shot of some panras was taken at a shutter speed of 0. 3 seconds and if we zoom into 100% it is pin sharp and this image is 100 megapixels that's a big ask so this just opens up the possibilities for different photo opportunities for me quite significantly another great thing about this for me is that it has a one tbte uh SSD for internal storage as well as the CF Express card slot and this is really great for someone like me cuz I have ADHD and I might easily grab my camera go out somewhere to shoot and then when I get there I find I've left my memory card in the card reader on my desk I literally can't leave the SSD at home because it's built into the camera so on the Downs side the auto focus is a bit patchy it works most of the time has face detects but it struggles in low light and it can occasionally give false positives for locking on to focus for those xan night shots I took uh it was too dark for it to autofocus at all I had to focus manually which wasn't really an issue because of the huge screen and the really nice way your manual focus it was really easy so since making this video I've bought a few more lenses with my own money which has actually made this video uh a net loss for me but um never mind but one more down side I would say about the Hass of blood lenses is that they are aggressively sharp now that works well for some people but for me I like a slightly more soft filmy type look this is easily sorted by putting on a quarter strength promist filter and that just makes the images that come out of this lens absolutely just stunning so it's not really an issue so I mean to be honest it's difficult to find fault with this camera but then you would expect that at this price and that is the elephant in the room isn't it the price for most people this camera will be prohibitively expensive I was only able to get one because Hasselblad gave it to me so who is this camera for it's not going to give you amazing autofocus or ridiculously high burst rates this camera is focused on producing the most stunning image quality available on the market so I wouldn't recommend this to someone like a sports photographer I would probably recommend this to someone who does a genre that's a bit more considered and slower someone like a portrait photographer landscape photographers travel photographers fine art photographers anyone who wants the best image quality available on the market and has enough income to justify the cost of this camera or just someone with a hobby and a very large amount of disposable income so thank you hassleblad for sending me the x2d 100c this camera has really blown me away in a way I didn't expect but it is a lot of money but then you get what you pay for and I'm very lucky to be in a position where I can get my hands on one of these so I'm going to keep it I'll see you next time