I just finished Danilo Piccioni’s course on “Evolution of a Masterpiece” at Perfect Picture School of Photography.  It was intriguing requiring two things, a decent understanding of layers in Photoshop, and a modicum of creativity.  For those without Photoshop skills but interested in learning, PPSOP offers basic courses on this subject.

Photoshop is an application that I’ve learned over time and once you grasp the basics, it’s easy to build on them with a fair amount of experimenting and online tutorials.  On the other hand, the subject of creativity is a more intriguing because some say it’s an inborn talent and others that it can be learned.  Through the years I’ve come to believe both.

Here’s the polemic according to Chairman Ron based in the old Nature/Nurture debate.  Everyone is born with creativity. It’s the essence of our existence both as individuals and a species.  Imagine how far civilization has come from its earliest stirrings on the savannahs of Africa.  Our progress would have been impossible without human creativity. But then you say that’s the collective creativity of evolving cultures and not necessarily representative of each person’s abilities.   Using an extreme case to illustrate individual creativity; most everyone if stranded on a deserted island would figure out a way to survive with whatever resources were available.  The movie “Cast Away” starring Tom Hanks is a wonderful illustration. Creativity makes our lives viable and often exciting.  It’s a life force that keeps pushing us on.  For some it comes naturally yet others have to work for it.

Geniuses are the obvious custodians of creativity.  It comes easily to them creating masterpieces of literature, art, music, architecture, science, and yes, photography.  The rest of us grasp it in lesser amounts. Why is that?  Some have more native talent than others.  I don’t wonder that in all of humankind’s genetic milkshakes, sometimes a person pops out with all of his or her DNA aligned for membership in MENSA.  But I’d ask, how many geniuses lived and died without their songs ever heard? Was their genius suppressed and if so by whom or what?  Destructive environments and bad upbringing can be an overwhelming force in the way a person is molded sapping any creativity that might lie within even if they are genius.

In contrast, mere mortals like myself come into this world with a range of creative talents, albeit not as profound as a genius’s; however, these talents when nurtured will flourish.  All of us have sparks of it finding them in even the smallest rooms of our lives.  Some might be wonderful cooks, or terrific gardeners, or talented engineers.  True some are better at it than others, but fear not, the creativity in all of us is waiting to be awakened.

So I do believe it can be learned, but the result, depending on the individual is in degrees.  Albert Einstein’s loving mother who took the time to teach him math, a subject in which he did poorly in school, will get an entirely different result than a talented mentor with a person of average intelligence.  But I have no doubt that good teachers make better students and the results show in their creativity.

Bringing Inanimate Things to Life - The Crying Bronze

My own creativity came sometimes with training and other times through life’s lessons. The first door that opened to my creative room was a definition I heard by Mike Vance.  Mike is a lecturer who teaches creative thinking and he defines it as, “Creativity is the making of the new and the rearranging of the old in a new way.”  I wasn’t certain that I could “mak[e] the new,” but I was sure with only a small effort I could “rearrang[e] … the old in a new way.”  Armed with this new confidence I was ready to venture out of my comfort zone.

Childhood Puzzle

We’ve all heard the expression thinking-outside-the-box and what better way to illustrate it using the old High School game of connecting nine dots using four straight and continuous lines.

Thinking Outside the Box

Most people when they first attempt the solution feel confined by the implied box-like pattern of dots and the result is they can’t do it.  When you think-outside-the-box the mind’s eye transcends the boundaries making the solution easy.   This was one of the many techniques I learned and then others as I continued learning to unlock my own creativity.

A 25% Productivity Improvement

Now here’s another challenge Mike gives.  Do the same exercise with three lines.  Stumped?  Easy, just make the dots bigger. I can hear the objections now.  “You didn’t tell me I could change the size of the dots,” or “That’s cheating.”  Yes, but that’s the point.  You’re only cheating yourself when you submit to the slavery of convention ignoring breakthroughs that improve outcomes.

Now let me give you one more test.  Connect the nine dots with one line.  If you figure it out, share it with the rest of us.

Think of not so obvious ways to avoid the obstacles that stifle creativity.  Craig Strong did when he invented the Lens Baby.  Take a look at it and see how he took the concept of the Holga Camera or Vaseline smeared on a prime lens and advanced it to a professional level, “…rearranging…the old in a new way” and then making it easily interchangeable with modern DSLRs.  I don’t use it nearly enough, but whenever I find myself in a photographer’s slump I break out the Lens Baby and explore the world “…in a new way.”

Does it come easily?  Heck no.  I often struggle to find breakthroughs, but there’s another universal truth I’ve discovered that is the handmaiden of creativity.  You can’t make something if you know nothing.  Well, here it comes; my homage to all of those teachers that wondered what the heck I was doing wasting their time as I drifted into senseless classroom reveries or worse disrupted their teaching to entertain myself and fellow classmates.  I’m sorry to all of those I made miserable because as I’ve aged I’ve learned the more I know the more insight I have, and that insight is a major building block to thinking creatively.

Speeding Home to Dinner - Shutter Speed 13 seconds; f/14; iso 200

The first camera we ever owned was probably set to ‘automatic’ abdicating our photographic reasoning to a faceless programmer at Canon, Nikon, Olympus, or others.  Their own genius was taking thousands of real-life examples of exposure and from that developed algorithms that preset the aperture and shutter speed to varying light conditions and focal range.  That was sufficient for the moment but as time passed we were frustrated with the limits that put own our work.  Not satisfied with being ruled by the dogma of a dumb computer with a lens, we looked for new ways to manually control the camera’s functions.  We read, took courses, attended workshops, studied the works of the masters, and then flexed our newfound mental muscles to create results that were consistent with our new vision.  Sharply focused images became bokeh, landscapes popped with excitement, and we captured the implied motion of a car’s headlights by increasing the time the shutter was opened.  Suddenly you were creating art that was consistent with your imagination.  Our mind was unshackled by knowing more than before; and you thought creativity couldn’t be learned.

Creativity comes from standing on the shoulders of giants.  You have to know what they knew in order to think differently.  Sir Issac Newton stood on the shoulders of the Ptolemy, Aristotle, Copernicus, Kepler learning, that which worked, and that which didn’t.  It led to his landmark theory of Classical Mechanics.  Next time you drop loose change that rolls under the middle of your car forcing you to crawl on your belly to retrieve it, remember it was Newton who figured out why that happens.  Want a more creative solution?  Move the car 🙂

Picasso stood on the shoulders of Matisse, Cezanne, and other impressionists and post-impressionist adapting their techniques that gave us the school of cubism.  Thomas Edison took from Humphrey Davy, Herman Sprengal, and ironically a photo processing innovator, Wilson Swan, perfecting the modern light bulb.

We are all the beneficiaries of our forefathers gaining much when we take the time to understand their teachings.  I study Tai Ji Quan and at the end of our warm-up we always salute and bow just before beginning the Tai Ji long form.  We do it to show respect to those who came before us thanking them for their accumulated wisdom that they have passed on to our generation.  If you want creativity, learn as much as you can and then creation will become a simple next step in the process of discovery.

That brings me back to Danilo’s “Evolution of a Masterpiece.” Evolution is a more apt word to describe the passage into creativity.  It comes from procedure, application, technique, knowledge, thoughtfulness, experimentation, and vision, but it comes slowly and always with hard work.  It isn’t luck unless you subscribe to the belief that luck happens when unanticipated circumstance meets preparation.  Edison’s light bulb was developed only after extensive experimentation with hundreds of failures resulting in a carbon tungsten filament enclosed in an oxygen free environment.  More than 130 years later and it is essentially the same today.

So whenever you’re stuck as I am often, read a book, take a course, go to a seminar, photograph things from down on the ground or from atop a tall ladder, visit a junkyard with your favorite macro lens leaving the others at home, throw on that Lens Baby and bend your focus into surreal visions, then stretch your mind beyond the confines of “expectations” and see what comes of it.  You might create your own surprises.