As a professional photographer I am at the beck and call of my clients to create visuals based around their concepts, brand identity and company ethos. This is a wonderful thing as I get to work with some creative and innovative people and am always involved in the creative process. This also means that on a day to day basis I am also juggling many different brand identities and their specific requirements when it comes to photography.
As wonderfully exhilarating and energising as this may all be, after long periods of constant shooting the creative edge can be dulled a bit and weariness may set in. So what would any normal person do, go on holiday or take a hiatus? Not me, I like to squeeze my creative juices by taking my own pictures, of a variety of subjects.
Ideally I like to disappear into the bush for lengthly periods, however this may not be practical all the time especially when the calendar is full. So it was at one of these junctures that I found myself quite happily sitting in a filed of wheat on a friends farm, quietly on my own.
All I had was one camera with a 105mm macro lens, no pre-conceived ideas and no brief to fill, wonderful. This allowed me to take pictures of whatever I saw that interested me, and in a field of wheat this can really help get the creativity flowing, how else do you make wheat look cool? For a few hours late one afternoon I was lost in this happy bliss of selfish composition, and I think the results speak for themselves?
The above pictures are the result of that happy abandon and energised me even further to try and get more creative, different angles of the wheat. So over the next few days, during the golden hours when my family where happily distracted elsewhere I would disappear into the fields with no preconceptions and just a few different lenses to see how creative I could be.
Confident that I had done the macro lens proud I moved over to creating shots with a wide angle lens as well as my panoramic setup.
Creating a 180 degree panoramic image of this field of wheat at sunset allowed me to showcase the sheer size of the field.
I love using my wide angle lenses, they have an ability of really opening up a perspective in a unique way and this worked to my advantage as the fields of wheat I was photographing were huge.
So by doing what I love for myself for a few days I managed to fully charged my Chi, got my creative juices back to bubbling and came away with some wonderful stock images. Not bad for a few days 'holiday'.