Michael Freeman’s Creative Paths...
Michael explains how the subject, image treatment and graphical elements combine in creative photography fresh overview, here’s the ‘creative triangle’. Just as there are three ways of changing exposure, there are three ways of boosting creativity: subjec
Michael explains his idea of the ‘Creative Triangle’, a way to make your images more arresting and interesting
The idea that managing the image could be as practical a matter as managing the camera, is how I came to write The Photographer’s Eye, along with a few other books that stepped away from the equipment but still tried to be brisk and informational. Managing the image mainly involves composition, or if you like to treat that as a two-step procedure, as I do, framing and composition, but it also includes other decisions, such as timing and colour aesthetics.
The broad topic of being creative in photography, which is what I’ve been writing about for the past year in
N-Photo, involves this, and is not about the kit. There’s tons of information about that throughout the magazine, which is why I concentrate on the more slippery subjects: how to be imaginative, catch people’s eye, be at least a little original.
Camera handling advice is always practical, and so I’m going to adapt one of the most basic, and useful, ideas in camera handling – the ‘exposure triangle’. However sophisticated the technology may be, or however doggedly manual you want to make it, there’s no escaping the simple truth for exposure – it’s the result of juggling aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity.
You want brighter? Then raise any or all of them. Darker? Less of any or all. But as each does something else as well, they can affect each other. There’s depth of field, frozen-ness of action, cleaner image from less noise. If you don’t want to mess with the brightness, more of one means less of another. An interactive triangle, which makes exposure so delightfully simple – and at the same time deep and subtle.
It’s a winning combination and much the same thing applies to being creative, and this series of articles is all about ways of kickstarting creativity. The solutions may not be simple, but for a
If you can find something surprising, little known, different, you can make it your own
initiated by Edward Makuko Nkoloso of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. The goal was to put a man on the moon before the Americans and Russians, and in an interview claimed that a crew of “a specially trained spacegirl, two cats (also specially trained) and a missionary” were ready for a Mars mission. Little progress was ever actually made, but this didn’t stop de Middel from fictionalizing it to bring it to life. She made her own definition of documentary photography: “Documentary should be more about presenting questions and opening debates than stating the specifics of a situation.” You might not agree, but the photo book was a success. Only 1000 copies were printed, but they go for more than £1,000 secondhand.
The images above are from a series of mine called Toilets. It’s not particularly serious and I have no plans for publishing them, but every so often it intrigues me to shoot this generally unacceptable subject if I find something unusual. In Finland, someone told me of a toilet with the best rooftop view of the city, and also of a charming, hand-built one for a family to sit down together. The main image shown here was in a slum area of Chennai, and smelled bad, which was why I liked the idea that it had some positive quality, just (and only!) as an image.