Telling our stories.
We’ve now come to the final piece of my Six Steps to Creative Mastery plan, the outline which makes up the building blocks of my Creativity Beyond the Camera online course. Having connected all the pieces together and created a beautiful body of work based around our chosen project it’s good to get it out there. Unless the photography was intended purely for personal healing and nurture the pieces need an audience to bring them home.
We tell our stories by capturing our message in the images, processing the shots so they sit together in a cohesive manner and finally by creating something from them, something real, very possibly physical. Editing, processing and optimising our images is too important to be a mere afterthought, or something that we automatically farm out to someone else. If we have seen the journey through to this point why not see it to the end and ensure the work has our personal stamp running through it’s core.
We began this series with me talking about the days of film. A roll of film plus processing would leave me little change out of a tenner. 36 shots, or 12 if I was working in medium format, just 2 with 5x4 film. Lightroom and Photoshop from Adobe are available for about £10 per month which in my opinion is a steal. There are of course alternative packages out there, some of which are free and the important thing is to seriously consider stepping up to this final stage.
Bringing Your Shots to Life
If like me you use the phone on your camera for some of your photography there are apps such as Snapseed which are free or cheap and very capable. As you bring your shots back to life maybe use a similar colour style to link them as a body of work too. This doesn’t need to be limited to monochrome as it’s easy to create a colour theme similar to those found in the Instagram app.
During the creation of your project you’ll have come to a decision about the final output for your work, whether this is a triptych of images for a wall, a book printed by one of the online companies such as Blurb or Lulu, a facebook gallery, calendar or even a published article. I’m sure you get the idea! Become a maker, a creator and get your images out to your audience.
Once it’s done begin work on your next project from the list. Working in this way will ensure you have sufficient drive to learn the difficult bits, to get out when you’re not in the mood and to see your work through to the end.
