John Lennon Memorial, Central Park, NYC

What’s your most essential tool as an artist?  While the right equipment can be an enormous aide to your success, we’ve all seen artists who can create with very little. And who runs all that fancy gear and tells it what to do?

Imagination is what gets the creative process started and keeps it rolling. It’s what drives your whole creative flow, as you can see from Picasso, “I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”

Michelangelo said,   ”I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”  He removed the marble until his vision appeared to others the way he had imagined it.

But if this is such a major tool, why has it been battered down since we were kids? You can remember being hit by zingers like, “that’s just your imagination” or “nice pipe-dream”  Yep, there seems to be those who would just as soon send you to camp bummer as see you as create your next piece of art.

So, if it’s the key to the whole game, then what? Are we all born with a certain amount of it and have to just watch it diminish as we grow up?

How about exercising your imagination? I mean like a regular exercise program.  Yes, you can develop this creative skill, like any other skill that you practice.

Here’s a few ways to do so.

1. Practice pre-visualization of your art. Ansel Adams taught photographers to do this in this short video, but this applies to any artist.
2. Get a notebook-sketchbook and note down your ideas, put your imagination and vision down on paper, and just that simple action helps it comes to life.
3. You can also use your iPhone camera like a sketch pad and shoot patterns, colors, images of all sorts for later use.  That’s how I got the shot above while wandering through Central Park with friends.
4. Look at other artists’ work and imagine how they did it.  Find the parts you love and try it yourself. If you’re shy about this remember one of Steve Jobs’ mantras was what Picasso supposedly uttered, “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.”
5. Push yourself to try new ways of expressing your art. If you are always shooting landscapes, make yourself go out on the street and capture people, up close.

Try this out and let’s see what happens. You can post any of the above in our Critique Group (even if you’re not a photographer, go ahead.)

Imagine…

Ikea products have never looked so good. Carl Kleiner teamed up with stylist Evelina Bratell to photography Ikea kitchenware for Ikea’s first cookbook. The products are very well arangged and photographed beautifully. Supposedly this cook book will be filled with beautiful photos of ingredents and kitchenware.

(via Co.Design)

Photograph by Jeff Johnson

You remember those photographs that remain etched in your mind and leave you wondering how can you create such an image?

The usual thought is, what you need to add to your work, what fancy tricks do you need to learn?

Look through your favorite photographer’s work and you’ll find the power is in what they didn’t put in the frame or image. Yes, it’s what you don’t see thats is often the secret sauce.

Here’s something I ran across yesterday in The Five C’s of CINEMATOGRAPHY,  a classic book by Joseph V. Mascelli (it’s loaded with great tips for still photographers too, I recommend that you add it to your library.)

“The secret of good composition can be explained in one word: simplicity. A complicated or cluttered composition, even though it obeys all rules of good composition, will not be as effective as a simple one. Simplicity does not imply starkness. A simple composition is economical in use of line, form, mass and movement; includes only one center of interest; has unified style which harmoniously integrates camera angles lighting, tonal and color values.

“The test of good composition is whether anything can can be removed from the picture without destroying its effectiveness. Any element in the frame not required for story-telling purpose, attracts unwarranted audience attention. Such distracting pictorial elements may steal the scene from principal subject matter. A simple composition is immediately recognizable and readily assimilated by the audience. The viewer should not have to search the framed area to discover the shot’s meaning. This is most important in motion pictures, which are series of individual scenes. A person may study a still photograph until he is satisfied that he comprehends it. A movie scene appears for a limited time, and is then removed. Confusing or puzzling compositions irritate the viewer, and may cause him to lose interest.

“Simplicity does not depend on the number of scenic elements; or the area included in the picture. A table-top shot depicting half a dozen objects may present a cluttered composition; while an extreme long shot of an advancing army may convey a unity of force and power immediately recognizable, because of its simplicity. If a vast number of compositional elements must be photographed, they should be harmoniously grouped.”

I’d love to see examples of how you have or can apply this to your photography, and how you’ve been able to make it work for you, put your image in our Photo critique group and let us have a look.

Photographer Ken Rockwell joins Marc Silber again to talk about how he captured his award winning shot “Mono Lake Under Pinatubian Light,” which refers to the special quality of light that happened after Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991. The ash entered the upper atmosphere and for months we had very weird light, especially after sunset. This image was made about 15 minutes after sunset, in fact all the other photographers had left by then. Ken said “always look where other aren’t!”
Ken tells how he captured this photo, using a camera that was out of repair, but knew how to compensate for its errors and still come away with an outstanding image!

Click to Enlarge.

Facebook is always changing the profile layout, whether we like it or not. On the previous profile we had the series of five photos which we made into “cover photos” with various apps to give our profile a unique look.

Now with the Facebook Timeline cover photo, you can get even more creative, especially because the profile picture goes right into the cover photo. Having the cover photo and the profile picture, go together can work wonders for a unique profile.

It’s pretty simple really, you could even just create a speech bubble with a quote in the timeline cover photo, and make your profile picture you with looking at the speech bubble or something of the sort. Get creative and share your creations with us! If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below!

Address Is Approximate is a beautiful and creative stop-motion video by Tom Jenkins of Theory Films. Here’s the one-sentence synopsis:

A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can – using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.

No CGI was used — all the animation you see in the video was done by hand and captured on a still photograph using a Canon 5D Mark II!

(via PetaPixel)

Nick Veasey, is an X-Ray photographer who created this awesome image of a Nikon photographer for the cover of the Focus of Imaging 2010 catalog cover. It took 12 images to make this shot but it seems to have turned out pretty well. Take a look at the behind the scenes video for more details. For those of you wondering. The camera was a Nikon D3x.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NkEE37oLeQ

Apparently it’s possible to make 1 music video with 288,000 jelly beans.

“In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis is a perfect example of hard work and dedication. It was filmed over a period of 22 months, which took 1,357 hours and 30 people to create.

Each frame was made with a jelly bean background on a glass table. The jelly beans were under the glass and Kina was photographed on top of the glass for every frame. Take a look at the video and then watch the behind the scenes video below to see true hard work and dedication. It’s amazing how much work was put into the video even before the filming began.

Almost 2 years of work for a 3 minute video. Pretty ridiculous right?

This time-lapse video by Dustin Farrell is one of the best one’s that we’ve seen.

It was all shot, not filmed with a Canon 5D Mark II in Arizona and Utah. At some points in the video, it doesn’t even look like earth!

If you’ve seen a better time-lapse video be sure to let us know!

Bob Dylan, a radical in his time for going electric.   All rights reserved by beastandbean

It takes courage to be great, to break away from the crowd and develop your own voice and put yourself out there.

If you’re doing what’s safe and  what everyone else is, you may get a lot of “likes” and “favs,” but at the end of day are you making photographs that you love?

With our AYP Club, what I really love is to see those of you who have the courage to put your work out there and ask for critiques; that’s a good first step.

I made a pass through last night and left some comments. My basic feedback is this: Courage.

Don’t stop at the easy, the good photo that might even win a local contest. Push yourself!  Have the courage to find YOUR VOICE as a photographer.

Go beyond what has been easy for you and explore your limits. In most cases this means being able to really engage your subject. But it might mean getting up at 5AM to get the best light. Or taking your camera to a rough part of town.

It’s about pushing your limits, learning what you can do and see, and help others feel what you felt.

Let’s look at an artist in another art form–Bob Dylan. He broke away from acoustic folk music, the convention at the time. He turned his music “on its head” and came out at the Newport Folk festival with his electric band and was booed at— that’s right. It’s hard to believe that an electric guitar was considered so radical, that it would shake up the status quo of what’s good music, but he did. He went on to tour the UK, again to boos, but he had the courage to push through.

Guess what, a year or two later, those same booers were buying records of the ”cutting edge” rockers. Then a few years later Dylan did it again by going back to acoustic, recording a counrty-flavored album with Jonny Cash.

Nobody could quite figure him out. He didn’t care about being successful, he just wanted to create his music and  put it out there.

Ansel Adams got flack for “manipulating images” – what the hell he said, of course I am, do you see the world as a two dimensional black and white rectangle, with a black sky?

I could go on and on giving you example after example of those artists who were willing to turn their craft on its head. You can think of your own heros who did so.

So how about you? Are you putting out photos that are “safe,” in your comfort zone? Or for that matter, are you afraid of even putting your work out there for fear of criticism?

Honestly, I don’t care if  our AYP Club is the biggest or the smallest. If we can help make a few more really great photographers, we’ll have accomplished our mission.

Push yourself. If you back away from shooting portraits of strangers on the street, make yourself do it. If the idea of shooting nudes makes you squirm, find someone who will pose and shoot them, in the raw.

Name out to yourself one area of photography you back away from and then make yourself shoot it.

This is our assignment for this week’s Photo Dojo.  BTW, there are way more members of the Dojo than are participating. Photography is not a spectator sport! Decide if you’re there to make photographs that you love or you’re an on-looker— and if so go to a museum and look!

I believe in you and that YOU can do it. Let me see what you’ve got.