2 Hot Ingredients for Inspiration

Inspiration, inspiration, inspiration! Whether you’re a photographer, artist or writer… we can all sometimes struggle with feeling uninspired. So what do we do when our inspiration seems to disappear into thin air?

Well, everyone has lots of tips and techniques – but most great artists/photographers know this one key ingredient to help get our creative juices flowing.

As Pablo Picasso so famously said:-

“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

– Pablo Picasso

It is so true. Regardless of how uninspired you may feel, it’s fundamentally important to continue and carry on working and creating.

It doesn’t matter if you photograph the same idea again and again. Even if it’s an idea you have tried hundreds of times, don’t let that stop you. Go and do it again.

The most important thing is to not sit around and wait for inspiration to come to you. The only way to find it is to become active.

Additionally, sometimes using the same idea repetitively, in the same location, with either the same pose, model, landscape, etc… can sometimes help get our inspiration flowing more than anything else.

So to break it down…

1). Never stop creating. Regardless of how boring or repetitive your ideas feel, go out and photograph them. Only when you’re working will new and exciting ideas come to you.

2). Limit yourself to using the same theme/model/pose/location. Choose a location (a field, room, street etc), and a model/subject and then go and photograph that same idea again and again. It’s about learning how to take something simple and become creative with it.

Once you’ve used the same location and/or model a number of times, it’s easy to feel like we’ve done that idea – so we should move on to something new… but if you concentrate on making yourself use similar ideas and thinking of new ways to make them look different, it can make you feel more inspired than ever.

If you don’t want to limit yourself to using the same location, model, etc. Limit yourself to a theme. So for example, you could choose the theme “freedom”, and concentrate on creating photographs which express freedom.

Choose whatever theme appeals to you. It can help you find countless different ways of portraying a certain emotion/theme through your photography, whilst still working with the idea of limiting yourself to a particular thing.

To give you an example, below are a selection of photographs with the general theme being freedom.