Creative limitation

2024 02 26

Lately our photography has felt a lot like going through the motions. Seeing compositions and subjects and then just taking the shot, without working the scene. We've also felt creatively stagnant.

today, we found a youtube channel that talked a lot about creative limitations to try and develop skills as an artist. they suggested only using a specifc hand, focusing on specific colours, only doing specific lighting scenarioes, stuff like that. we've had a lot of ideas like this in the past, and it reminded us what writing our photography page was like. We'd focus on just one element of taking a picture, and explore it, and how creatively exciting that was.

One of our last areas of focus before our first camera broke was isolating large distant subjects, like buildings, with 200-300mm equivalent focal lengths. we want to try continuing this, but couldn't today, since neither our legs or the bus can take us to the places we need to explore these compositions.

so, we instead decide to focus exclusively on the other side of the zoom range! Wide angle!

Our xf 18-55mm skirts the edge of wide angle, so we decided to go out with that! we let ourselves use focal lengths between 18mm and 23mm, which is 27-35mm equivalent. Letting ourselvses use 23mm kinda felt like a coppout, cuz it's only just barely wide angle, and is rapidly approaching a normal focal length. Like, 18mm makes us uncomfortable, whereas we can work 23mm into something.

Now, usually when we have try going out and restricted to one focal length, its our 56mm. 56mm is our favourite focal length and we're pretty comfortable with it (althgouh still have things to learn) but this familiarity stops us from pushing ourselves to try new things sometimes. we can relax into our comfort zone, and photograph passively.

When we went out today with 18-23mm, we had to work for our compositions, we didn't know what worked. Most of them turned out worse than expected. At the same time, we did find a lot of things that worked much better because it was wide angle. Especially close ups of plants.

, we aren't actually entirely unfammilar with wide angle. We use it quite a bit to create hard edge dramatic images with a sense of perspective and scale to communciate power (lack thereof), and to make viewer uncomfortable, and we also use it a lot in landscape scenarioes when we don't feel like doing a telephoto panorama. In these settings, 18mm feels like it gives us a high.

But today, we focused on more basic, more boring compositions. Boring is poor word choice but i think communicates what i mean!! dont want to stigmatise things or call them bad, its just our brain is in semi automatic mode !

closeups and portraits with wide angle are really hard. we need to get really close, to the point that distortion starts to set in. We tried taking a portait of a lamp pole, but the pole just looked funny when taking it so distorted!

we were definitely way more comfortable using 23mm and from what it felt like, seemed to be what we always set the lens at. we think this is because it feels more familiar to us, its closer to what we know. nothing wrong with that! its actually kinda cool to know that about ourselves. We don't use 23mm very often, so practiicng at it is also good.

based on the pictures we took, we seemed to focus on very close close ups, with distant elements in the background, rather than having more empty space.

we really appreciated our lens's wider than normal aperture, i think. it heavily aided in this shooting style and we spent a lot of time thinking about what aperture value would work best for a certain photo

we also tried our hand at portaits and environmental shots

something that a lot of the pictures make us feel is how they could be better if we cropped them. i think that thought probably comes with us wanting it to look more like a longer focal length, and not knowing how we like to use a wide angle yet. and thats okay

i think we'd like to extend this challenge for the rest of this week. or, i think something healthier would be trying to default to using a wide angle lens, and slowly we'll maybe start to see compositions that work well with it.

i think we'd also like to redo this with longer focal lengths, especially 35mm, to relearn what we like to shoot with it intuitively. s

doing this, we realised how many little restrictions we can impose on ourselves with our camera, if we want. while we were doing this, we forced ourselves to use all manual controls, but also tried sticking to one of the default white balances. we didnt change our film simulation very much, either. our camera has so many tiny features that can make us engage with photography entirely differnet. and when we've exhausted those, we can do external things, like only using our left hand, or not being allowed to stop moving in street (these are ideas the video suggested, and we really liked them, especially the second).

a very good one we wanna try is using a 1:1 aspect ratio, although i think it would be more fun to try and focus on colours and focal lenghts.