A beautiful fall vista from the Blue Ridge Parkway

Fall colors on the side of a mountain in the Blue Ridge Range

I had a great time this weekend shooting fall foliage. Sometimes when you’re in a business development, management, or strategy role, you get too far away from the creative process. At least that’s the way it works for me. This photo is another reason why I really love the area that we live in…if I lived in the middle of LA or Chicago I’m sure I’d find different and exciting images to make, but I really think Appalachia offers limitless opportunities.

I used some of my new filters to make these images, and I’m highly impressed with both products. The top image was taken using a of these images used some great filters that I highly recommend. The top image was taken with a Singh-Ray Graduated Neutral Density filter, and the second image was taken with a Tiffen Circular Polarizer.

This morning I thought I would stretch my weary creative soul and attempt to make beautiful what I’ve always felt was a bit ugly. I grew up in northern Indiana, where lots of snow in the winter is still pretty common, so I love snow and what it does to a landscape. However, the part of lots of snow that always got a little ugly was when the roads were salted and cars started driving over them, defiling the pristine blanket and turning it into a ruddy, grey, and sloppy urban slosh-fest.

So here you are…part abstract art, part creative exercise. And I still love snow!

I recently read an article in this month’s Popular Photography that said a key to creativity is “unleashing your inner 9-year-old”. In other words, allowing your unrestricted creative side to take center stage, ignoring aspects of practicality and the limitations of your current camera technology.

It made me wonder, “Would my 9-year-old self think my current self is cool?” And also, “Is this even remotely important to the world of advertising and interactive media?”

I’ll address the latter first: business of any kind without creativity is dead. And I’m not just talking about artistic creativity here, but creativity with finances (within legal limits), HR, infrastructure, sales, project management, IT, etc., is all critical to a properly functioning business. As a former project manager, I can often let my obsession with proper details ruthlessly crush the big idea of a dreamer, simply because the idea at the time seems impractical. But I digress. Indeed, we need to be at least as creative as a 9-year-old in order to be successful.

Now, the former: would my 9-year-old self think my current self is cool? After much debate, I think little Andy sure would, at least for the most part. The reason I can be confident about this is that I’ve been blessed to do now what I’ve always thought I’d do: have a career in advertising and in sales. So on the job front I think I’d think I was pretty cool (follow that?). Sure, my job isn’t as cool as GI Joe’s, but I wasn’t really allowed to have many of those anyway (thanks Mom).

Plus, I’ve done quite a few things to keep my 9-year-old dreams alive. Through luck, I was able to marry a wonderful woman who grew up in Kenya, and thus in 2005 I was able to drive in the African bush in a Land Rover, one of my childhood fantasies. I’ve also purchased several large kites, and thus fulfilled my childhood dream of regularly being dragged across the ground by a giant kite. I have a son, some incredible friends, and I get to do crazy stuff like stand in a freezing waterfall in January with my best friends pointing and laughing. I feel like these things would be cool to my 9-year-old self, because although I’m constantly creating new goals and priorities, I still come back to wanting to do something crazy every now and then. I think the day that stops is the day I stop being creative.

That doesn’t mean that I’m never constrained by the harsh realities of life; far from it. But I think my 9-year-old self would understand that in order to buy a new bike, you have to mow the neighbor’s lawn to make some coin. I just want to keep some dreams alive and parts of life ridiculously fun.

What things do you do to keep your inner 9-year-old satisfied?

Currently one of my more popular stock photos, taken in the Smoky Mountain National park near Mount LeConte.

Lately, I’ve been spending more of my free time on reading about improving my photography, and I think these lessons apply to any creative pursuit. Here are five great things I’m learning:

1. Be patient with yourself
   Great paintings take time, and so do great photographs. Whenever I’ve been assigned to take pictures of something or someone, I have to fight to keep calm and to take my time, almost as if I expect myself to be fast because I’m supposed to be “good”. Preparation, scouting, and lighting have a lot to do with having more consistent outcomes, but all of those things require time.
2. Mental toughness is key
   Shooting when you’re tired, hot, cold, or just creatively drained can be a real exercise in mental toughness. Buckling down and forcing yourself to carry on can result in some amazing imagery.
3. Get it right in the camera, whenever possible
   The old, “ahh, I’ll just fix it in Photoshop” saying usually has a really negative impact on my creativity. What this is code for is, “I’m lazy, and I’ll fix it later”. However, there are so many aspects of a photo that simply can’t be fixed later, such as realistic depth of field, blown-out highlights, and overall composition. Plus, even though I’m pretty handy with Photoshop, getting it right in camera usually only takes a few minutes, whereas I can tweak the image for hours in Photoshop to try and achieve similar results.
4. If you get one incredible image a year, you’re doing well
   The above statement is paraphrased from Ansell Adams, and I learned of it via another photographic genius, Ken Rockwell. You simply can’t come home with masterpieces every day, and that’s okay. But keep trying, and eventually you’ll hit that one in a million shot because you actually took a million shots.
5. Spend your money on good lenses
   Good lenses help to ensure that when you get something right, you get it really right. I’ve learned this the hard way, where I’ve gotten some great images on a crappy lens and then had a hard time selling them. If you can’t afford the top of the line, that’s cool, keep using what you have until you can afford what’s right for you. But if you’re serious about photography, save up and buy the good stuff. I’ve never regretted a purchase for photography gear that was top-of-the-line.

I just read a story published in the Sydney Morning Herald that I was pretty shocked didn’t make headline news on Brandweek or Adage. Evidently, someone at Virgin Mobile Australia ripped an American teenage girl’s candid photo off of a Flickr account and placed it on billboards and print ads all over Australia. Now, anyone with half a brain knows that’s an enormous violation of common decency and the law, because no model release was obtained. What I was surprised to learn is that had the image not had a human subject and the photographer was credited on the ad, it would have been perfectly legal. The Sydney Morning Herald explains (I made a few spelling corrections for them, otherwise this is verbatim):

“People who post photos on Flickr are asked how they want to license their attribution. The youth counselor [the photographer] chose a sharing license from Creative Commons that allows others to reuse work such as photos without violating copyright laws, if they credit the photographer and say where the photo was taken. His Flickr page appears at the bottom of the ad.”

This is stirs up the Jekel and Hyde within me. As a photographer, I would be hard pressed to just offer up my images for public and/or commercial use without being compensated, and I highly doubt that most people (especially young people) who check that box know what the heck they are really doing. But, as a marketer, I had no idea such a rich and completely free resource existed!

I feel pretty bad for people who are routinely taken advantage of by technology. Spyware, adware, copyrighting snafus, planned obsolescence, identity theft, involuntary data mining tactics, etc. In some ways, I don’ t think anyone should be surprised by it, as our lives have been rapidly, completely, and irrevocably changed by the dawning of the Information Age. We simply haven’t had enough experience with all of the emerging technologies to be able to properly legislate proper protections, nor have we had enough experience living in this new era to know how to properly cope and adjust to the new ways that people are trying to exploit the average Joe.

While I’m not normally an advocate of lawsuits and I admittedly don’t know the entire story, I do hope that Alison’s family wins this lawsuit big-time, because I can’t imagine such a stupid and irresponsible act on the behalf of Virgin going unpunished. Thus far, Virgin is doing a terrible job of handling the story, with the US division crying “it’s not our problem!” and the Australian division refusing to comment. This looks to be a story for the PR textbooks, to be sure.

It’s also nice to have an outlet for creativity that pays for itself =).