I'm looking for inspiration!

Hello all

This may be slightly off-topic, but hopefully people won’t mind too much…

It’s been a couple of years since I last did any serious photography – I’ve been so busy with my ‘real’ job I just
haven’t had any opportunity. My experience has mainly been in small (5x4” and 10x4”) platinum prints. I’d
produced a number of prints, of various subject matters – portraits, churches, still life, flowers, landscapes –
you get the picture: a mix of everything! I’d just been taking and printing for my own enjoyment and
experimenting with different subjects as they came along. At that time I wasn’t even too sure how the quality
of my prints compared with any others (I’d never seen a platinum print apart from my own!)

I then went to an event where you could show your portfolio to a number of picture buyers and art gallery
representatives, and the feedback I received was that my photographic and printing skills were fine, but that
an art gallery or agent would require me to produce a body of work on ‘A Theme’.

I came away encouraged, but for the next while I almost went crazy trying to think of a suitable subject matter.
Then other work got in the way. However, I’m now at a stage where I’ll be able to pick up the photography
again, and immediately have ‘tripped up’ on how to build a cohesive set of ten to fifteen prints.

I know that everyone will be different, but I wondered how other people go about this. I feel that perhaps I’m
not a ‘real artist’ (I don’t really have anything to ‘express’). I consider certain subjects, such as flowers, then
immediately worry that they’ve been done to death, both by the original ‘masters’ and by modern ‘fine art’
photographers. Then again, perhaps the abundance of these simple compositions is due to their popularity
and because they sell. That being the case, maybe there’ll be a market for anything I produce, even if it’s not
radically different from other photographers’ work. It’s also easy to fall into the trap of thinking that one
‘needs’ additional or alternative equipment to do a subject justice, or to treat it in a different way – you know;
additional lighting, a greater selection of lenses, etc. However, I know that’s not true. For example, although
I have a 10x8”, the smaller prints personally please me more, despite having heard people say, “you could
have blown it up really big”, and I feel I'd like to work within the 10x4" format at this time - that's one positive
decision!

Thanks for listening. Maybe I haven’t expressed myself very well, but I feel I need to have a few suggestions
and techniques thrown at me before I can move on and happily start producing work again.

David
Received on Sat Aug 13 14:06:47 2005