Welcome back to our lessons in iPhone Photography. In today’s lesson I’m going to do my best to share a fairly abstract creative tool illustrated with a few concrete examples. Last week I was in Belize working on a new iPhone Photography book. The book will feature iPhone images following the world famous Hummingbird Highway from the eastern coast of Belize to the Guatemalan border in the west. If you’d like to know when it’s published, sign up for my newsletter and you’ll be the first to know.
I shared the context of this project with you so you could see how I use the tool I’m going to present in this lesson. When you are working on a photography project with a finite time-frame and budget, you have to make images. There’s no option for returning the following day, or complaining that the muse isn’t with you.
In previous lessons I’ve shared ideas about changing perspective and compositional aids that can help in our creativity. However, this one single piece of photographic wisdom has served me better than anything else I’ve learned. One of my personal photographic heroes, Bruce Percy, says (this is a bit paraphrased) “whatever it is that initially draws you to a scene… that is what you should focus on.”
It is a simple, yet very powerful creative tool. I use this advice all the time by making whatever it is that attracted me to a scene the subject of my photograph and trying my best to reduce the other elements within the scene. As I mentioned in the beginning of this lesson, I want to illustrate how I’ve used this wisdom by sharing a few concrete examples from my recent trip to Belize… Read More
