Abstract from the Mundane

Outside of our photography jobs, and often comfort zone, many struggle to locate and discover new and creative methods of expressing our creativity. We often search, more often than not outside of our homes and/or workplace, for something new and creative, ignoring what is right in front of you every day. One key to discovering new subjects to photograph is to look at every day objects differently. By changing the way you view something, and maybe more importantly, how you shoot and develop those shots, an entirely new world can suddenly appear giving you unlimited and apparently new subjects to image.

Many of us get wrapped up in the everyday grind and doldrums of life. We tend to view everything around us at face value such a statue being just a statue or a glass ornament being nothing more than another ornament. This is not to state that there’s something wrong with us for falling into this rut, but it does limit our ability to ‘see’ more than what’s ‘just’ another object. Seeing is the first step to see, think, shoot. We see way too much, but we usually don’t stop to think like a creative photographer until we make an intent to do such, ignoring potential opportunities right in front of us.

Every week I hear and read the same repetitious exercise being regurgitated, “get out of the house and find something new to shoot”. Now I’m not saying there’s no merit in going out and finding new and exciting opportunities to discover something you’ve never shot before, quite the opposite. I myself spend a fair amount of time, when life allows me, driving around looking for something new to ‘see’, hopefully in a new and creative way. What I am saying though is that we have a tendency to stop ‘seeing’ what is front of us each and every day, tuning out a plethora of potential ‘new’ ways and worlds to photograph.

An exercise I often conduct is walking around my house in search of hidden, or rather not-so-hidden opportunities to discover a new ‘layer’ of vision to everyday and oft simplistic objects that are lying around just screaming to be re-visited with a new insight. Most, if not practically all of us have unlimited things, themes, events, and so on, around us, just screaming to be rediscovered.

Don’t just try to look at everything around you as a project, look for different and unique ways to create an image out of the mundane. It can be challenging but most rewarding at times. Do this as an exercise: pick an hour or so and walk around your house, looking at things you have and start imagining it from a macro shit, partial section, see and think if it something would be cool out of focus or cropped creatively or how it might look with Lightroom gone crazy with it; create potential images in your mind, don’t be in fear of wasting your time or failing, there are no failures in creative vision, just practice shots(!); and then shot away, trying every angle, DoF, colour cast, clarity and/or contrast offset, temp and tint change, and any other concept you can throw in. All too often when doing this we discover something new and amazing, usually ‘not’ what we intended or even thought about. There’s so much you can find when you look and truly try to see something in a new way, giving you so much to envision in a new way (or light, lol), within your house/apartment, yard, or even on a walk around the block.

So go crazy, look at the world in a different way. Start with what’s around you. Take a walk, see and then think before pressing the shutter. Want to make something out of nothing. Create a vision where no one has gone before, right in front of you!

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I put some soap bubbles on a DVD the other day, placing it in the window to allow strong direct sunlight to pass through both the bubbles and DVD causing a prismatic effect.

Soap Bubbles on a DVD

This is a 160 pound garden Buddha by my front door, something I walk by many times a day, but usually only see the statue as a whole. But with a slightly different take on him, or viewpoint…

Garden Buddha

There’s a glass cat candle holder in a display window in my kitchen. Recently I slapped a 180mm macro lens on several extension tubes and decided to shoot through the glass, which created a really cool effect due to the various ways the light is refracted.

Through a Glass Cat

Here is another shot through the same glass cat above, but this time I decided to go crazy in Lightroom 5 and played with the develop settings quite randomly until I accidentally created this very abstract image that looks like a painting to me. Personally, I love it.

Glass Cat LR Enhanced