Writing these blog posts, creating photographs, and filming videos and tutorials all take various degrees of creativity. So how do I find new ideas to work on?
The short answer is that sometimes I don’t. I’ve been going through about a year and a half of creative burnout, but I don’t think it’s been a lack of ideas, just a lack of confidence in the work I’m doing paired with mild frustration with how quickly my business is growing. (I know, the dumbest thing to do is to disengage from a slow-growing business because then it stops growing altogether.)
I find my inspiration from everything around me. It goes like this:
I watch a bus picking up kids for school in front of my house and I am reminded of a childhood school experience of my own. That’s a blog post idea.
I see a beautiful rim light casting a perfect shadow and giving amazing color to the bus while it’s stopped and I make a note of playing with that type of backlight, maybe including a model wearing yellow/orange.
I see the way the stop sign swings out on the side of the bus and think about a tutorial on animating an articulating arm and flashing light effect.
I hear the bus drive away and I think about doing a DIY video on better soundproofing and acoustics for a home office setting.
Inspiration, or the spark of an idea, begins in everything I see around me, but the real art is created as the process rolls along and I build my version of what I’ve observed.
Look around and play with ideas. Use your brain like a virtual hand and feel every side of the idea and really think about what you see and hear and imagine.