creativity should never sleep

3 April 2008 No Comment

To all the professional photographers too busy to shoot personal work, I hope you can find time in 2008. While there are sometimes hot and cold periods, I’m always shooting something.

I’ve found it important to surround myself with other creative people in order to make this happen. Every morning my business partner and I come into our studio with new ideas about improving our personal photography or our photo business. We continually create new challenges and try to grow as photographers and individuals, reminding each other that we truly love photography and what we do for a living.

I realize we’re very fortunate and that our situation isn’t the norm. We’ve had to work at it. I’ve also worked in photo lab, retail and assembly-line photography environments, where it’s hard to think about shooting after you’ve punched the clock to go home at 5 p.m. In that case, seek inspiration when you can through professional photo organizations, online forums, museums and videos from the library. It’s well worth the effort. The bottom line: just pick up your camera and keep shooting.

Last year my focus was homemade pinhole cameras. I’ll be posting a video soon on how to create a really cool pinhole camera and the resultant images (speaking of videos, there’s been great response to the initial studio how-to video and more will be coming in the next few days).

Two years ago I concentrated on aged, timeless images. It’s a pleasure to announce that these will be shown publicly for the first time later this month. I hope you can join me Friday, April 18, from 6 - 9 p.m. at the Carnegie Arts Center for the opening of my photographic series “Forgotten America”. The exhibit will be located in the Connector Gallery.

forgotten america photo by Jim Talkington