Ten Foot Circle

Back a few years, I was instructing photographers about being creative. It seemed they always came up with common pictures that were seen in various places, mainly on television and in magazines. A couple students wondered why I was not pleased with their work. Then I changed an assignment.

After telling them about the lack of creativeness in their photos, a new teaching method was enacted. We went out on a field and I told them to find something around here to come up with. Although it was better, it still wasn't as good as I wanted. Then it came to me. A ten foot circle!

Each person had a fresh roll of 24 exposure B&W Tri-X film. (Sorry I didn't mention that was back in the analog days.) Then we went to another field, I instructed each one of them to remain in the circle and obtain as many photos as they feel is necessary, then bring back negatives for me to examine.

Most of the negatives still didn't look that creative except I could tell that several had basically run out of “standard” ideas. Then the real creativity came out. Some negatives were of grass, some bugs, then others were part close and part farther away.

A few of the grass and bug photos looked very good. Everything was in an organized fashion and look very good. Many others showed an excellent views of close and far away objects combined.

I was very pleased with the outcome of this assignment. It made them think about what to photograph and their creativity was well noted.

Now days with digital cameras, you can take numerous pictures instead of the smaller number my past students did. I've mentioned this same thing to several others in the past few years. This does not need to be in a field either. Virtually anywhere on the planet will work just fine. So give it a try and get creative. Hopefully it will help.