Book recommendation on shooting creatively

[JohnT]

Stovall's post on achieving your personal style made me think about a book that I have on my shelf. It's Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color, & Composition in Photography by Bryan Peterson. It helped me to begin looking at the world around me differently. I recommend it for anyone who has a difficult time "seeing the shot."

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-See-C...9373018&sr=8-1

[Gordon]

I'd also recommend many of the books by Freeman Patterson, particularly "Photography and the Art of Seeing" and "Photographing the World Around You".

[johnastovall]

I highly recommend Brooks Jensen's LETTING GO OF THE CAMERA.

[Duffy Pratt]

Moby Dick, and I'm only half joking. Pay particular attention to all the chapters about whales and whaling.

[JohnT]

I'll have to check these out. Thanks for posting them (except for MD :-).

[jeffkohn]

I second Stovall's suggestion. Brooks Jensen is a really good writer and there's a lot of food for thought in those essays (the book is a collection of essays). It doesn't have a recipe for how to be more creative (there is no such thing IMHO), or take a task-based approach with a bunch of cute exercises (not my cup of tea); but a lot of the essays really resonated with me.

[JohnT]

Originally Posted by jeffkohn

I second Stovall's suggestion. Brooks Jensen is a really good writer and there's a lot of food for thought in those essays (the book is a collection of essays). It doesn't have a recipe for how to be more creative (there is no such thing IMHO), or take a task-based approach with a bunch of cute exercises (not my cup of tea); but a lot of the essays really resonated with me.

Hmmm... A photography book without pictures. That's a paradox that I'll have to think about. LOL

[Duffy Pratt]

Originally Posted by JohnT

Hmmm... A photography book without pictures. That's a paradox that I'll have to think about. LOL

It's not a paradox at all. The creative process can happen before the picture is taken. In many ways, images themselves can impede people's thinking creatively about photography. Part of creativity involves looking at what you are doing from new perspectives.

BTW, that's the main reason I brought up Moby Dick. In the middle chapters, which everyone seems to find excessively dull, Melville takes the subject of the whale and examines it from just about every perspective imaginable. I especially like the on whales in scrimshaw. He's looking at his subject from every standpoint that he can, to get new ideas about it. The method, if applied to photography (or just about anything) can lead to lots of surprising insights. Creativity sometimes benefits from a creative approach. I don't expect you to actually try this, but I thought it might be worthwhile to try to explain why I was only half joking.

Duffy

[xseption]

Thanks for sharing these!

~ edd