The other day I was replying to someone off of one of the many email lists I am on who had emailed me offlist about being stuck with respect to their creativity. This got me thinking.

Even the most creative of people get stuck sometimes. We are creatures of habit and it is very easy to fall into habit even with our photography or artwork. This is even true for those who are fully in touch with their creativity.

So what do you do when this happens? Well you can beat yourself up, bemoan that your muse has gone on holiday to Tahiti or you can do something creative to loosen up your creativity. That something is to make a change. Any change will do. Change what time of the day you do your creative activity. Change from a favorite lens to one you use less frequently, shoot on the ISO setting you never use because of noise or try some different piece of software.

In change lies the secret to growth and when we become stuck with our art we have stopped growing. Growth is good and one could argue that there is no life without growth. By changing anything at random we shakeup the steady state that has killed our growth. Randomness is the key, because if you try to do it all too deliberately you risk being over cautious and not introducing enough of a change to bump the status quo.

Any fans of the Jurassic Park films, or even better the Michael Crichton books on which the first two films are so loosely based, will remember the mathematician Malcolm. Malcolm in the book (I don’t think it made the film in its fullness) makes a speech about systems appearing stable but this only appearing so because the system had settled into a local energy minima and that any perturbation to the system can jump it out of the local minima and produce a period of rapid change until the system settles into a new local minima. Now the above makes perfect sense to me given my maths background but if you don’t relate to chaos theory I hope you get the drift.

Changing anything can bump us out of our steady state and introduce a period of rapid and unpredictable change before it settles into a new stable position. You have to be prepared for it to be a rough ride, because you have no idea whether the movement produced will be short and easy or massive and difficult. Whatever the change does, it will likely get you unstuck.

Here are some ideas for things to change. You can just pick from them at random if you like:

  • Use that lens you rarely use
  • Only shoot at the highest ISO setting the camera has
  • Download a new plugin and try it
  • Download some shareware software and use it to make some images
  • Try the Photoshop blending modes you never use
  • Use that program you have had installed on your computer for ages and have never used
  • Try drawing over the top of your prints
  • Grab a Photoshop or similar book off your bookshelf, open it at random and try whatever is on that page
  • Do a Google search on whatever imaging terms come to mind and randomly click on some of the search results
  • Use that camera filter you have never used
  • Go look at someone else’s photography or art and see if it stirs you up

This technique is not only applicable to your art and photography. You can apply to any aspect of your life that needs loosening up, from a relationship to work.