How/where do you draw inspiration?

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Derek Lofgreen

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I went for a little hike in a new area today. I have never been there before and came across some really interesting things while walking. I didn't have my camera with me, just a leisurely walk. I kept my eye out as if I had my camera. I was able to notice other things around me too because I wasn't fiddling with my gear. Sort of photographing with my mind, pre-visualizing. Now, after that one walk, I think I have a new project to work on for the next few months.

It made me think too, about how others find inspiration. How about you? What do you do, or have you done, that inspires you to continue photographing the world around you?

D.
 

Valerie

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For me, it comes from anywhere and anything: a line in a book, a dream, my children's actions, long-forgotten memories that resurface, light falling just so, other photographs, an interesting texture, a scene from a movie.......
 

Shawn Dougherty

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While I find plenty of inspiration in the world around me I think it's more important to simply make sure you're out there working. If you are things will happen for you.

Brett Weston put it best, (paraphrasing) Art is damn hard work. You drag yourself out of bed and get out there, then you get pumped up as you're working.

I believe if you're always waiting for your muse you're spending to much time waiting....
Going out with just one lens and camera seems to focus my vision and present a challenge when I'm in a funk though.
 
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copake_ham

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Up in Copake and out in Tucson I do a fair amount of bicycling. I ride very light, so I certainly never take a camera with me. However, as you did with your walk, I often note things along the way that I'd like to shoot.

So many times, after a ride and a clean up, I'll take a drive along the same route (or part of it) and take some pics. Of course, I cannot control the light etc. so sometimes I come up empty - but often times I do find a shot that I'd never have found without first having ridden more slowly by on the bike.
 

Ray Heath

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g'day Derek

hows about walking around with the simplest camera/lens combo that you are comfortable with and not fiddling with it

Ray
 

IloveTLRs

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I walk down streets I've never been before with a compact 35mm camera. Over the summer I rode my bike around the city (26 miles/44km in one day) and found all kinds of places I wanted to go to again. Since then I've been exploring all kinds of new places in the city.

I also like looking at old photos from the 20th century (first 5~6 decades) for inspiration.
 

Michel Hardy-Vallée

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I've been doing a lot of photos with geometrical forms, criss-crossing lines, interlocked areas, etc etc, and I've been wondering for a while where it came from. I'm very excited by a lot of Modernist art, so it shows in photos like this:
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

(Yeah, it's not terrible, but it's just to illustrate the point.)

But I think I've found a more general pattern the other day: recently, I did a language lessons exchange with a student (my French for her Mandarin), and I spent quite some time trying to draw characters properly.

Lo and behold, there's a photo I took some time ago that has a very similar shape to the character for "woman" :
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

It wasn't a conscious decision, I just took the photo because it felt intuitively interesting, but I think it nevertheless tapped into a memory of patterns.

I've had a few other accidental inspirations, like this one:
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

This one, on the other hand, was the first time I was applying consciously a visual pattern on a subject:
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

This is another one where the pattern was applied consciously, but I was barely aware of what exactly it reminded me of when I took it:
(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

So that's the inspiration for the how: the way I take pictures these days comes in large part from the models I have memorized.

It's imitation in the traditional sense, like Samuel Johnson writing "The Vanity of Human Wishes" on the basis of a satire by Juvénal. It's the way most people have been doing art for centuries; the fascination for the original and unheard-of (or at least the illusion we entertain about originality) is a more recent development.

As to the inspiration for the content or mood, I guess there's something similar happening: some feeling from a previous experience resurfaces before a scene, and it makes you push the buttons.

So far, that's how it works for me.
 

Andrew Moxom

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My Mamiya 6MF rangefinder and 3 lenses are always with me in an Orion AW hip bag. It's in the car all the time with a small and lightweight benbo trakker monopod. The monopod works great as a walking stick on a hike and if I have time when I am out and about, I will nearly always crack off a few frames. I've missed too many opportunities to not have a camera around anymore. Inspiration for me comes form many things like music, quality of light, or that gut feeling you get when you know you have a cracking shot opportunity to exploit. Also many outdoor influences like wind, rain, fog, snow, are there to exploit, and you get to a point when you know what will work and what won't. That gut feel/sixth sense thing. Now I'm no expert by a long shot, but I'd rather have a camera and have a shot at something that presents itself, than get caught without one when the same scene comes to life. You typically never know when inspiration will hit, be ready!
 
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Derek Lofgreen

Derek Lofgreen

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All great posts. Can you elaborate on how music, a movie scene, or a line in a poem has inspired you to make a particular image or series of images?

When I was on this hike I was inspired to do something more than just a chance shot with some great light (although those are fun moments). While on this hike it was high noon and terrible light to make any photo that I would have liked anyway. I had my pocket camera but left it in the car because I just wanted to walk. But I did see so many things that I took note of, and now I am watching the weather reports etc. so I can get the shot I see in my mind. It also made me think of some other places I have wanted to shoot but didn't really know how it would fit in with all of my other images. After this hike it all clicked and now I am ready and focused on it. I was inspired to produce much more than a happy accident.

D.
 

Struan Gray

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The faster I travel, the less I see. So I walk, often the same walk over and over again, until something clicks and I come across a thing or a scene that just screams at me to be photographed. I am pig-headed and artistically deaf, so sometimes the thing needs to scream more than once. Eventually I dig out a camera (the biggest I can carry) and I bang off a shot just to make the noise stop.

Then it's back to walking.

My inspiration comes from poets, painters, illustrators, novelists, musicians, sculptors - in fact, from anyone who finds a way to make a space in their lives for their own creativity, and who has the nerve and the dedication to follow through on their instincts and actually do something.
 
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Valerie

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All great posts. Can you elaborate on how music, a movie scene, or a line in a poem has inspired you to make a particular image or series of images?
Its just something that happens inside... I see or hear something and it conjures up a vague idea for a photo. Most of my projects involve using my kids, family, friends who "volunteered" (or were drafted!) to recreate these scenes for me.
 

scootermm

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My inspiration comes from poets, painters, illustrators, novelists, musicians, sculptors - in fact, from anyone who finds a way to make a space in their lives for their own creativity, and who has the nerve and the dedication to follow through on their instincts and actually do something.

struan...
that image is astounding. You mentioned painters as inspiration... I was immediately reminded of Mark Rothko from your image post.

very well seen and executed, an image I wish could adorn my wall.
 

TheFlyingCamera

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I draw inspiration from works of literature and art, particularly works that are ripe with symbolism. In some cases, quite literally - I've shot photos to illustrate passages from an Elizabethan period play, and Greek mythology. I draw visual inspiration from the same sources too... Caravaggio is a major influence, as are Michelangelo and Da Vinci.
 

removed account4

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i don't know if this makes sense,
but i just stop thinking
and let things happen ..

i find inspiration just by noticing the world around me,
whether i am (being held hostage) riding shot gun in the car,
or slaving away at the kichen sink (supposedly doing the dishes),
or chatting with a stranger ...

great thread!

john
 

Vaughn

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I suppose I am most inspired by what I photograph...the light reflecting off the landscape. Next comes the landscape and the things that live there.

Vaughn.
 

Struan Gray

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struan...
that image is astounding. You mentioned painters as inspiration... I was immediately reminded of Mark Rothko from your image post.

very well seen and executed, an image I wish could adorn my wall.

Thanks scooter. That photo comes from a series that is very personal to me, which I am now tentatively trying out on a wider audience. It's very encouraging to hear it made a positive impression.

I'm too disorganised to sell, or even give away, prints; but I have ambitions to put out a book. APUG will hear the word if it comes to fruition.

It's interesting you pick Rothko as a model. I don't know if you have read the ongoing abstract expressionist thread, but there I have talked about how much that school has influenced me and my photography. My feeling is that this is Rothko-esque only at a distance, but becomes more and more busy as you look closer. My favourite painter from that movement is Marc Tobey, and a soon as I saw this I loved the way the cracks in the ice made their own "white writing."
 

Videbaek

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Whenever I'm bored and fed up with picture-making, I take a break. If the break goes on longer than I'm comfortable with, I relax and start looking through my favourite books of drawings. Whenever I come to that tiny brown ink drawing by Rembrandt, made with a bamboo pen (probably), of the farmhouse in snow with a fence coming into the foreground with the purest calligraphic beauty imaginable, I feel a flush of pleasure and excitement and inspiration flows to me from everywhere.
 

keithwms

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Regarding music as an influence, I can say a bit more.

The music that I found most "visually' interesting was composed by Alexander Scriabin, who is also thought to have been possibly afflicted (or blessed?) with visual/auditory synesthesia. Scriabin associated certain chords or even individual notes with certain colours. He believed that it was possible to combine all the senses into one sublime experience, in other words, he didn't see any need for a clear separation between them. I often look (pun intended) to his music or that of D. Shostakovich for visual inspiration. There are some pieces from both of them that strike me as extremely visual. Some of the work from DS is painfully visual for me, I can't stand it for that reason, it's just so dark and gloomy. Scriabin tends more often to evoke flight and unusual light, for me at least.

Funny, Albert Schweitzer pushed the theory that the music of J.S. Bach is visual- I certainly don't see it as such even though I dabble in it and have tried to "see" it. The intricate and interwoven pervasive fugue structure makes me more attuned to timing and dynamics, but not colour per se. Bach's successor (in many ways other than geographical), F. Mendelssohn, composed some of what I think is the most strongly visual semiromantic music. I find it impossible to listen to, for example, the Hebrides overture without getting a very vivid landscape in my head, and I don't think it's merely because pieces like that are often playing in the background when we see dramatic landscape on TV or the silver screen! I think that style of composiiton is as inherently visual as the impressionistic genre (Debussy et al). Mendelssohn composed a literally description of something he saw, he was just a tiny bit more shackled to convention than Chopin and later Scriabin.

Scriabin would interest anyone who wants to know how wonderfully chromatic "classical" music can be- it may well give you visual thoughts. Listen to, for example, Vers la flamme, which of course evokes a crackling flame and which (I think) somehow engages the sense of touch as well, when performed by someone with complete mastery e.g. Horowitz:

ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_FKKIC1oSw

Another very strongly visual piece, for me, is the trio op.67 of Shostakovich, now that is one glorious organic meal consumed in four courses; not surprisingly, I had it strongly in my head whilst looking at the microworld of bugs and lichen and moss and minerals around Mono lake a few weeks ago. It is just crawling with unfamiliar life, but has a strong undercurrent of Jewish folk rhythms, perhaps.

I just find it very hard to listen to this kind of music and not get visual ideas that inspire me to want to look for particular compositions, and conversely, when out shooting these things just pop into my head, quite audibly. I think the photographs that are most satisfying to me are the ones that I associate with a particular musical influence.


And no, I don't use and never have used any psychoactive substances :wink:
 
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telkwa

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I (like many people here), have way too much equipment, and often carry too many prime lenses around. I grabbed a lens I hadn't used in almost a year (20mm Ultra-Wide for 35mm camera) and shot a roll with it at my favourite place to take pictures (fishing boat docks at the harbour). It forced me to come up with new ideas on how to make a pleasing picture with an unusual lens. When I developed it - I was pleased with several shots.
 

davetravis

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Hi Derrick, long time no ear!
I'm to the point now where all I think about is how the final print will look. Realism, surrealism, abstract, fantasy,
AA or Van Gogh?
The actual subject matter is becoming secondary to the final impression I'm trying to make in the print.
This ain't always easy, because nature is mostly natural!
BTW, I'll be at the Longmont fairgrounds the weekend before T-day. Stop by and say hi!
DT
 
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