Many photographers use the label creative photography as a broad term to describe the act of making a creative decision when taking a photo. Shouldn’t every photographer should be making creative decisions about things like compositions, what to include and what to crop out, what angle gives the most interesting perspective and applying techniques to direct the eye through the frame. Photography is a creative pursuit after all so adding the word ‘creative’ to it seems a bit redundant.

What is creative photography

It is a genre of photography devoted to experimentation. It’s about using interesting techniques to turn your photographs into works of art. And certainly these creative techniques can be used by any type of photographer be it landscape, portrait or any other field but there are also photographers who work in this field exclusively. A regular photographer may spot a pretty flower and take a photo of it, a creative photographer will be thinking, can I create interesting bokeh, can I use a prism to refract some rainbow light around, can I spray the flower with water and capture the glistening drops or perhaps get the starburst with the flower?

Creative photographs capture attention because they’re unique. They’re the photos that stop people scrolling and make them say wow, how’d they do that?

With that, however, has come negative connotations of creative photography used to be called ‘trick photography but that term seemed to fall out of favor with the rise of photo editing. I’m not exactly sure why but I suspect the term ‘trick photography’ implies a level of deception, and as Photoshop composites became more and more convincing, people started to look negatively on being deceived by photography.

Makes us better story tellers

Anytime you’re assessing a scene and considering how to make it more creative you’re instinctively thinking about what story you want to tell, whether it’s showing us an interesting texture in a subject, or placing an object in a landscape to direct the eye and create context or changing your white balance to convey mood. Storytelling is what makes the world go round so learning this powerful skill helps us express our unique vision and makes our images more relatable.

Limitless possibilities

To be creative is probably why you became a photographer anyway and you can translate this into and genre. There are landscape photographers who specialize entirely in focus stacking or a portrait photographer who only shoot models with gels. Both of these photographers are household names in the photography industry and if you dig deeper you’ll find many more. You can take any one of the vast variety of creative techniques and turn it into a specialist career.

I find that dull repetitive tasks dampen my creativity and photography is one of those outlets that lift me up and helps me reset the creative triggers . How about you? What are your creative triggers that get you back on track? Leave a comment for me below, I would love to hear from you.