Modern photography has a big problem: and it has to do with the brain rot that so many of you are suffering from. You’re endlessly scrolling away on social media and not giving yourself and your brain a break. That’s why there’s such a big appstinence movement to regain our brain power. And with that, photographers will hopefully stop using AI to do the work for them and stop treating their images as just content. The images you make shouldn’t be coming from visual inspiration, but instead, it should come from how you feel about the world. So how does one do that?
Start Reading Books
Ideas come from books. When you’re being fed information via movies or TV shows, you’re being given exactly what a cinematographer wants you to experience. But with books, you have to make that for yourself. With that said, you can create these experiences all for yourself and they won’t all look the same as someone else’s.
Or Listen to Podcasts and Envision What’s Happening
Alternatively, you can listen to a podcast and give it your all like you’re at a listening party. Don’t do anything else. Just take in the podcast or the audiobook. Can you keep your attention on this? If you can’t, then you should exercise this muscle a lot more.
Mark Seliger doesn’t spend all day scrolling through Instagram. Nor did Annie Leibovitz.
Use Your Imagination and Fill it Out Vividly
Imagine things. Make up your own world and let yourself get bored so that you can experiment with stuff. When you do that, you get creative. And that’s not only fun and unique, but you actually start to make things like you did when you were younger.
Describe Things and Use Word Association
When you use word association, you find ways to challenge your brain. Otherwise, you could just draw those things out. However, the days of photographers saying that they can’t use words to describe how they feel are really over. We have to use our words these days. And you have to think about it.
Shoot What You Feel, Don’t Do it in Post-Production
Once you’ve got all of this in place, use the descriptions that you’ve come up with and apply that to your images. Do all that work in-camera and don’t do any of it in post-production.