It's Not the Camera, It's You! Really.

Why is it not the camera, you ask. It is not the camera because the camera is just a tool. If you are not pleased with how the house turned out, you do not blame the hammer, do you?

Different cameras make different tools. Panoramas, portraits, sports, whatever you chose to photograph there is a type of camera that will be the best tool for the job. But in reverse, you can always pick up a camera, look at what it can do, and from that deduce what kind of picture you should aim for with that camera.

Why is it you, then? Because you are the one not making the most of what you have. And this fine blog is here to help you.

That said, let us move on. Hi there. Welcome! This is the introducing post of the It's Not the Camera, It's You! blog. Here Limitations Are Fun, and Not Enough Light is a good thing.

I thought I should start with talking a bit about the main focus for this blog, namely creativity and cameras. Digital cameras, to be specific.

Digital cameras

To put the digital camera in perspective, we have to go back in time. 1991 Kodak and Nikon released the Kodak DCS (later DCS-100). It was not the first digital camera, but one of the first you could actually buy in a store. It consisted of a Nikon F3 body with a big chunk of digitallery smackad on at the bottom. It was 1.3 megapixels for the price of $13,000. Many a photographer lusted after it. I know I did. But today many of us will turn down a $100 mobile phone if the camera is not at least 5 megapixels. Even if we never use our phone for photography. So, what happened?

Competition happened. In order to sell cameras, you need an advantage. You have to have something the other brands do not. AND, you need to convince the buyers this advantage is neccesary to fully enjoy the object on sale. This has given us point-and-shoots with 14 megapixels, DSLRs that can capture video and a lot of other things.

The megapixel race has made digital cameras go out of style very quickly. The cameras you bought ten, five, two or one years ago look like Ford Model-T:s compared to what you find in the camera store today. But, like the Model T, many of them are still usable, even very much so. The trick is finding out what for. We will use them for the mental weight-lifting that is creativity training.

Creativity

Creativity is something a lot of us wish for. Many people think it is some sort of gift given to other people, and not to them. Actually, creativity is like a muscle. It is there, but you have to work it to make use of it. So how do you learn to flex creativity?

The bad news, is that it is all work work work folks. Sorry. You have to do things, instead of dreaming about doing things.

In my experience, actually doing things make you more creative. Why? Because when you do things, *some things go wrong*. Most often these things just adds to yor frustration, but every so often, you look at a picture where the exposure went wrong, and you find you really like the effect. So you go about to duplicate what went wrong, and when you found how to do it at will, you have another way of making pictures.

Sometimes, you go overboard with you new weapon (Picassos "blue" period is a good example), but at least you have another way you can actually do things. And being creative is about finding different ways to accomplish your goals.

Blogger and productivity guru Merlin Mann talks about the  problems with cretivity, in particular about the differences between feeling versus being creative in this article. It's basically what I just said, except the part about the cameras.

And that is what we will be doing here. Learning how train creativity and appreciate not-state-of-the-art apparel. Not only are limitations fun, they can help us be much better at what we do. You are welcome to come alongfor the ride. No matter if you are a total newbie or an seasoned pro, you can always find new angles. Pun intended.

Articles are prone to arrive at a bi-weekly basis. Each day though brings the Picture of the Day, often with a photo tip. You are all welcome to hang around!

Up next, our first exercise. Until then, what is the most meaningless feature/function you have found on a camera?