Creativity Exercises

On Saturday, I got up at the crack of 8:00 or so to gear up and head down to a local park for a gathering of photographers who wished to stretch their creativite muscles. We were each required to bring a random object, some sort of camera, an open mind, and we had to be there on time.

I wracked my brain trying to come up with a good, random object to be photographed. Something with flexibility. Sometime fun and interesting. Aha - Socrates, Caleb's sock monkey. I was pretty excited about this choice. A sock monkey, a garden at the park, and a camera = fun photos. Or so I anticipated.

But these creativity exercises were about thinking outside the box, about being creative with whatever comes your way, about doing something different. So we were paired up with another photographer (10 of us total) and we each had 20 minutes to photograph our partner's random object in 10 images. Oooh, what a tricky leader/instructor we had. Obviously, my partner had it easy with Socrates. He came up with some pretty fun shots.

What did my partner bring? A pair of statues.

They turned out to be a very interesting couple to photograph.

For the second exercise, we had new partners and one person had to walk and walk and walk until the partner said to stop. Wherever you stopped, you would mark that location, and then you had 10 minutes in which to shoot 10 photos no further than 10' away from where you stopped, using the random objects or not. Naturally, my partner (our illustrious leader/instructor) was nice enough to stop me in the middle of a dirt trail. Fortunately, with my 10' radius, I could get to a few things. And I had a zoom lens on my camera, so that gave me some flexibility. Here are a few of those:

And for the third exercise, we had yet another partner and you had 10 minutes to take three photos in which you tell a story. My partner? Yeah, he got to tell a story with a sock monkey. Easy peasy, right? Me? He handed me his wallet. I had to tell a story in three photos with his wallet. Okay then.

Okay, it's not a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, but it's a story, nonetheless. Sometimes you have to work with what you have.