Creativity Exercise #1: Bathroom Lockdown

[evil4blue]

I'm posting this with Brad's blessing, so please don't flame me.

A little background first. I’m currently working through a workshop designed by Freeman Patterson to help me think more creatively when it comes to my photography. Mr. Patterson has designed a number of exercises to help open your creative eye and I thought that these would be interesting to share here, in our beloved forum. I will be adding a new assignment every couple weeks to help myself and others get their creative juices flowing.

Here are the rules.

1. These assignments will be a little more restrictive then the normal photo assignments posted by Brad.

2. These assignments are meant to help members look at their everyday world a little differently, so there are no real rules about composition, color, or theme.

3. This is not a competition. Pictures posted are for discussion, humor, and/or inspiration to others.

4. Unless otherwise noted in the assignment, keep the post processing to the basics (WB, levels, cropping, unsharp mask, contrast adjusting). Conversion to B & W is okay, but no toning or heavy filtering.

I guess that's it, hopefully some members will get something out of these assignments. I plan on fully participating and I hope others do as well.

First Creativity Assignment:

Lock yourself in your bathroom with your camera, one lens, flash and tripod (if you'd like). Take 20 different photos; then post no less than 3 and no more than 5 of your creations. Hopefully after the postings we can have some discussion about the photos, techniques, and the assignment.


The next assignment will be posted: 9/23/2005

Happy Shooting!

[Jake]

Uhhh....there can be nudity right ?
I have a idea I call 'tripod'.

[brad]

Originally Posted by thejakestir

Uhhh....there can be nudity right ?
I have a idea I call 'tripod'.

Oh, that's a baaaaad boy, Jake.

[TxKent]

Uh-oh. If I'm going to do this, I'm gonna have to clean the bathroom.

[PhotoSpidy]

I'm with you kent, after reading this post I went and looked at mine. Mostly mirrors that need to be cleaned and a vine infront of my window that has taken over the garden tub.

[evil4blue]

Alright, let's get started. I went up to my master bath and spent almost 1.5 hours in there. Needless to say I got a queer look from my wife when I walked out with my camera and a big smile on my face. She's learned to never ask questions when I lugged my camera around the house. I decided to use my old sigma 70-300 macro since I rarely use it anymore. This made things a little thougher since I had to stand a good deal away from my subject to get decent focus.

Most of the photos you can tell what they are, but the first one is the sky through a sun screen, a dirty window, and a cool mint scope bottle.

[evil4blue]

@ Kent and Spidy,

Don't think of it as dirt, think of it as texture and character.

@jakestir,

Your a man after my own sense of humor.

[dab94]

Ya know......I've seen this particular project posted on several other message boards in the past, and I've always thought to myself "I'm gonna try that". Well, now's the time. I'm gonna tackle this tomorrow.

[whiteyfoo]

Please continue this in the future, or maybe we can do user submitted ideas. Time to lug the equipment into the bathroom. Back in an hour or so.

[Sonny]

[cyk]

That was pretty fun thing to do in 1 in the morning...

[evil4blue]

@whiteyfoo

I plan on posting these for a little while. I have a number of exercises already, but if you have an idea for one, feel free to pass it along. PM me with your ideas rather than posting them in these threads, a major part of these exercises is to be surprised by the theme/assignment. I don't want people contemplating future assignments for weeks on end because that kinda defeats the purpose of spontaneity and creativity.

@ dab94,

I've seen this exercise posted other places as well, I guess this is the defaulto beginner exercise in most creative photography classes. That being said, it's an easy one for everyone to participate in. Everyone has a bathroom, you don't need to leave the house, and you don't need any exotic equiptment. In fact, most of the exercises I'll be posting won't require you to venture too far from home. No excuses about not having anything interesting to shoot in your area since everyone will be starting from the same spot.

@everyone,

So far so good, I see people started posting photos last night and there is already some interesting work.

There maybe some members out there that don't want to participate because they think this is a fruitless task or feel silly looking around their bathroom for something interesting to shoot. My answer to those people is to try this task with an open mind and see what you get.

The first time I did this exercise I felt like it was impossible to get 20, pseudo interesting, shots from my bathroom, but I took my time, relaxed my senses, and just tried looking around the room for the basics: Color, texture, patterns, lighting, angles, and movement.

As an example, you may think about taking a photo of a toothbrush, but then you decide that the toothbrush isn't really that interesting. Instead of looking at the toothbrush as a whole, look at it's color, the pattern of the bristles, the angle it sits at in a cup, how the tooth brush relates to other objects. Maybe the toothbrush will look better in the background as you focus on a tube of toothpaste.

This is the type of thinking you should force yourself into when looking at a scene. By no means am I an expert at this sort of thing, but I hope to get better at it as I do these exercsises.

[dab94]

This was definitely a challenge. But evil4blue is right.....this is exactly what we should be forcing ourselves to do when we survey a scene.

This excercise served several purposes for me.
1) I'd been meaning to do this forever now. I finally did it.
2) I've realized that my bathroom really needs to be cleaned.
3) I'd been wanting to do a 'found objects' project using every day items (toilet paper, q-tips, etc) for my sister to hang in her bathroom. Now it's done.

I do feel like I cheated a bit, though. At first, I just started photographing things as they were. Then I switched into macro mode and got close to the everyday objects we take for granted.
Then I took it a bit further, and started pulling things out of the medicine cabinet. Rearranging the toilet paper. Dropping a handful of q-tips on the floor to see what type of pattern they'd make. You get the idea.

I'm not sure that was the goal of the project, but it did get me thinking about what types of images I could *create*, not just snap off while I was in there. I came out of there with 54 images.

If you haven't done this yet......get up, go grab your camera, and go spend some time in your bathroom!

[whiteyfoo]

My turn. Shot entirely ona digital (new for me, yay!). No post work besides resizing. The JPGs do seem to loose a bit of color and clarity. I need to work on that. Anyway, here you go.

* I really like everything that has been posted so far. I ended up shooting 80+ images, and spend near 2 hours in the bathroom.

[Silvernic]

Hey, that last one looks like my whole bathroom!