I’m always looking for more.
I wrote a post in 2018 about creativity and a man responded to it with words that put a spark in my imagination. He said that we all should be more than we are.
You can interpret that lots of ways, but I found it to be relating to the online classes I teach with the BPSOP. In a manner of speaking, it also fits in with the “Stretching Your Frame of Mind” workshops I teach around our (round) planet.
Why you ask?
I recently did a zoom class with a large camera club in a city I really shouldn’t divulge. At any rate, it really doesn’t matter because through the forty-plus years of conducting workshops and zooming with fellow photographers, I have found that there are no geographic boundaries when it comes to photographers sharing the same issues.
It seems that the older we get, the more we are set in our ways and are not willing to “be more than we are”; walking down the path less traveled. These photographers I’m referring to have reached the pinnacle of their creative thought process. They have become shutters pushers that shoot either what they have seen others shoot or what others have told them the way it should be shot. They love their camera club meetings and look forward to sharing the same ideas, munching on Goldfish while washing them down with Diet Coke.
I’m certainly not judging them (well sorta,maybe just a touch), it’s merely an observation.
Years ago while I was conducting a workshop in Provence, the day before the start a woman living nearby, that had taken all my online classes, drove to where we were having dinner. During dinner, she said that the reason she drove to meet me was to answer my question in person.
Towards the end of my part I class, she had said that the photos she was submitting would not be accepted in any competition, or even approved of in her camera club. My question to her was, “Why don’t you start your own camera club?”
She said that she had taken my advice and along with several others that felt the same way, did start their own club. She laughed when she said that they all knew what Monet and the rest of the Impressionist Painters felt like when their work wasn’t initially accepted.
So, my fellow photographers, don’t take the path well-traveled. It will only lead you down a one-way path to mediocrity; purgatory for the creativity in you.
Visit my workshop at www.joebaraban.com, and check out my workshop schedule at the top of this blog. Come shoot with me sometime.
JoeB
