Everyone gets stuck in a rut once in a while. Sometimes it can be difficult to find your way back on the creative path again.

Here are 10 ways to kickstart (and maintain) your creativity.

1. Journal

Get yourself a notebook and start journaling. I use a small notebook because it is easy to carry with me wherever I go, but any notebook will do. Some people like to use bigger notebooks with lots of space on each page, but I find it limits me in always carrying it with me.

Write down your ideas, dreams, problems, visions, compositions and rambling thoughts as they come to mind. Don’t delay, because thoughts are often very fleeting.

I use the legendary Moleskine ruled pocket notebooks for my journaling together with this very cool and compact Ion Gel Ink Cross pen. Both work great for me as I can carry them with me anywhere.

2. Fresh Input

The mind needs stimulation. Your sensory input gets stored in memory. By giving your mind fresh inputs on a daily basis your memories get triggered and combined with the new input. This can help generate new ideas and new perspectives.

How do you get new input? Do something new each day. Listen to different radio stations, take a new route to work or when you walk the dog, read or borrow different books or magazines, take a stroll through a shopping centre. Keep your eyes and ears open – and taste, touch and smell things.

3. Relax and Unwind

Listen to music while lying on the floor. Sit outside in the sunshine and do nothing. Lie in the green grass and look at the clouds drift by. Take a stroll, ride your bike or go for a swim. It’s important to give yourself some down time where you can unwind and let your subconscious mind do its work. Getting new ideas in the shower or while you are driving may sound like a cliché, but it happens all the time.

Find your way back on the creative path. Image by Thomas Folke Andersen

4. Learn to Draw

Use Betty Edwards’ book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain to teach yourself to draw. It’s a wonderful book and you will learn skills applicable to problem solving and enhancing your perception of the world. In fact many of the techniques discussed in ‘Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain’ applies to photography as well.

5. Associational Thinking

The mind stores information by association. The inputs described under ‘Fresh Input’ above can trigger associations.

To demonstrate associational thinking, try to write the word ‘happiness’ in the middle of a sheet of paper and draw lines radiating out from the word. Then write down your thoughts on what the concept of ‘happiness’ means to you. You can it a step further and ask other people to do the same exercise and then compare results. This exercise can be particularly useful to generate ideas for conceptual pictures.

6. Challenge Yourself

Give yourself a new challenge each week. Work on a new problem each week, explore something new with the purpose of solving it or generating ideas. Give yourself regular photo assignments. Challenge yourself to photograph something new.

You may even take on a project. I have done projects like “52 weeks, 52 photos” and August Snaps with the sole purpose of challenging myself creatively.

7. Limit Yourself

One exercise you can do today is limiting yourself to photograph in one area for a certain period of time.

Go to a location that presents a reasonable amount of photo opportunities. This could be the local playground in your area, your local park or nature reserve or perhaps even the local car park. Bring a watch and then time yourself to photograph for one hour. 

Keep photographing for a full hour. Continue shooting even if you think you have exhausted all possibilities after 30 minutes. Don’t worry about ‘mistakes’ or ‘failures’ (there really is no such thing) but push yourself to go further, try new angles, low view points, high view points, tight views, wide views etc.

You’ll be surprised just how many creative and interesting images you’ll return after this exercise. Investing time in a location is one of the easiest ways for you to become more creative, to look deeper and see old elements in new ways!

Take a walk through the creative forest. Image by Thomas Folke Andersen

8. Learn a New Photoshop Technique Every Week

While Adobe Photoshop is only a tool to help refine your own personal vision, it’s still a creative tool that can help expand your creative horizon. The more you know about Photoshop, the more creative possibilities are available to you in post-processing and achieving your own personal vision. Additionally a speedy post-processing work-flow also equals less time in front of the computer and more time in the field.

An excellent ressource for Photoshop training (and lots of other software program training) is Lynda.com.

9. Study the Geniuses

You can benefit by learning from the lives, ideas and actions of the great geniuses of history. Adopt a role model – maybe Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Edison and find out more about them and their lives.

Photographically the geniuses of history could be (but are certainly not limited to) photographers like Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Eliot Porter, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Josef Sudek, André Kertész, Edward Weston, Yousuf Karsh etc. etc. It can be whoever you personally admire in the history of photography.

Here are some ‘genius’ books to consider:

• Creating Minds by Howard Gardner
• The Genius in All of Us by David Schenk
• The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle
• Idea Mapping by James Nast
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

10. Create Your Own Inspiration Files

If you’re anything like me you enjoy reading photography magazines as a source of inspiration. And if you’re like me, you’re also likely to have a lot of them lying around and have hard time getting yourself to throw perfectly good magazines out.

However the reality is that it’s usually only some of the articles that interest you in each magazine and 30-40-50 percent of magazines are ads anyway. Instead of throwing good magazines out, go through them, tear out the pages and articles that interest you and organize them into files. I simply use affordable, spiral-back portfolios with 40 plastic sleeves per folder which are available from my local stationers. It reduces the clutter, gives me a number of files packed with photography and articles that interest me.

I have written a whole separate blog entry on creating inspiration files which you may wish to read as well.

So there you have it, 10 ideas to kickstart (and maintain) your creativity. However these are of course only 10 ideas out of many available.

If you have any other ideas to kickstart your creativity that you would like to share, then please feel to share and discuss these in the comments fields below.

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My very first post on this website was Top 10 Best-Selling Photo Books which featured Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure in spot number one.

Bryan Peterson is also the author of another great book titled Learning to See Creatively which is a great book about design, colour and composition in photography. It’s full of great examples of what to look for when you’re doing photography – examples of how to see.

I have made it a habit to practice seeing wherever I go. I’m always looking for images even when I don’t have a camera with me. It helps me keep my vision sharp (pardon the pun). About a year ago, however, I purchased my first serious compact carry-with-me-everywhere type camera; the Canon G9 which – despite its small body – is capable of spitting out 12 megabyte RAW files!

The Canon G9 has since been replaced by the Canon G10.

While I have made a number of images with this camera in the past year I have not been the best to carry-it-with-me-everywhere. However I took it with me on a walk today together with the family and used it to make some portraits of my one year old as well as making a few images for myself including the one above (click the thumbnail to view large version). I have titled the image ‘Unexpected Symphony’.

Personal Photo Challenge Starting In August

Since the Canon G9 is a great little compact camera – and to push myself to practice seeing even more – I have made the decision to challenge myself to make more photos with it and carry it with me more often. So throughout the month of August I will make sure to carry the Canon G9 with me every day wherever I go and I will then make at least a few images with it everyday. I will be uploading one image from each day here on the site so you can follow the results.

Update: See the images from my August Snaps project.

This is not the first personal photo challenge I have thrown at myself. In 2006/07 I took on a personal – fairly substantial – photo project called 52 Weeks, 52 Photos. Before that I have also challenged myself to get up at sunrise throughout the whole month of November to make images. Giving myself challenges like this helps me stay motivated and focused.

For me photography is like a sport. You have to practise to become good at it. Throwing yourself photo projects is one way to challenge yourself to stay creative and to keep shooting on a regular basis.

If you liked this article, you may also like these:

• The Magic of Black and White
• Going Back in Time in a Modern Way
• August Snaps 31 August

As photographers we are always on the lookout for inspiration and new ideas. Part of living a photographic life, to me, includes viewing a variety of photography online (portfolio websites, following photoblogs and discovering new ones as well as reading and interacting with various online photo ressources and photo communities). As much as I enjoy technology and the internet, I still also very much enjoy reading off-the-shelf photo magazines and photo books. In fact it is probably fair to say that I have an addiction to both photo magazines and photo books.

At some point my addiction to photo magazines got out of hand. My wife complained about magazine racks overflowing and spilling onto the floor where several stacks of photo magazines piled up over time. The piles of photo magazines on the floor made for great entertainment for our one year old daughter though, she had lots of fun spreading them all over the floor and tearing out pages to chew on!

This gave me an idea, although it wasn’t a very novel idea. Why not tear out the pages with interesting articles and inspirational images and keep them in a scrapbook and then throw  away all the junk pages? ‘Smart’ I thought, this would get rid of the piles of magazines on the floor, it would give me easy access to the articles and images I find interesting and I wouldn’t feel as if I was throwing away hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of good photo magazines.

The concept of Inspiration Files was born.

Now, like I said, this is certainly not a novel idea. The idea of keeping printed materials of personal interest probably dates back to shortly after the invention of printing! However, how many of us actually get around to doing it? Surely I am not the only person in the world who tends to procrastinate the slightly more laborious and tedious tasks?! The main problem, of course,  was that I had put off organising my magazines for years, so the task had become huge. I must have had hundreds of magazines to go through and it took me several evenings to get it all sorted, organised and done!

However as with anything you have put off for a long time, it was a great feeling when it was all done. I ended up with 10 Inspiration Files, each containing 80 pages which means I currently have 800 pages of photographic inspiration I can go to whenever I need a creative kick.

If you aren’t already scrapbooking or creating your own Inspiration Files I encourage you to start today. If you have a lot of magazines lying around, go through them now, tear out the pages that interest you and organise them into files. I simply use affordable, spiral back portfolios with 40 plastic sleeves per folder which are available from my local stationers.

Once you have your initial stack(s) of magazines are out of the way it is simply a matter of keeping it up on an ongoing basis. Once you you finish a magazine, make it a habit to tear out the articles and images that inspire you and put them into your Inspiration File. If you are really organised you can even flag these articles and images when you read the magazine.

Over time you will have a bunch of files packed with great articles (since they are hand picked by yourself) which will serve as a great source of photographic inspiration for many years.

You probably already have one or several photo magazines that you read, but if you need some inspiration here is a list of magazines that I either buy off-the-shelf on a regualr basis or subscribe to:

Outdoor Photographer
Photo District News (PDN)
American Photo
B&W: Black & White Magazine
Photo Techniques
Lenswork
Photo District News
Practical Photography
Photofile
Better Photoshop Techniques
Better Photography (Australia)

I told you I was addicted to photo magazines!

Have fun creating your own Inspiration Files.

If you liked this article, you may also like these:

• Vision Is Better. Free the Mind, Free the Camera.
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