Just curious. Were you creative in another area before discovering photography?

As I said I think the word has been overloaded but I do see a distinction between the current use of the word and what I consider to be innovative.

Creative in the arts sense is novel, fictive, out of nothing, unconstrained (except perhaps by the medium) whereas innovation is doing something different with something that exists and is constrained by how it interfaces with the requirements.

I'm sure there are loads of holes in those definitions and things like photography and other crafts can be either
 
got into photography properly at 13 when my forms "home room" became one of the science labs, and there was a darkroom adjoining. Before that, I had music lessons (specifically piano) from the age of 9... Never saw that as particularly "creative" as it was all either theory or technique and playing other peoples music not writing anything of my own.

Strangely, around 15, I was dragged into joining a band with a couple of my mates, we were all into the heavier side of rock, and i took up bass (and guitar to a certain extent) - and the music theory i'd absorbed suddenly started to spill out into writing all kinds of stuff - none of it brilliant imo - but i was the only one in the band writing music - guitarist added his own solos and wrote some lyrics. After college, and earning a bit more £££ i bought a couple of keyboards, but would still mainly play bass in the bands I was in. I think to be honest it almost needed a different instrument to "unlock" the creative bit of my mind because I'd been so focussed on the lessons and exams for Piano which were pretty much all "classical" based pieces.
 
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Always been a photographer, became an engineer then morphed into an engineer who lives photography...

In music my foremost skill is with the recorder. The cassette recorder.

In art my style was described by my art teacher at secondary school as "primitive" or on a good day "avant garde". Closest I came to good at drawing was technical/engineering drawing.
 
Some interesting turns of discussion since my last post in this thread. My academic bent was languages, and I am comfortably competent in several and desire/plan to learn more, because I love the patterns I see and hear in linguistics. Maybe that betrays a creative bone? Then I had a spell for a few years as an actor, amateur and provincial rep, which is arguably similar. Then I've had a long 46 years and counting career in software (as programmer/analyst/tester/PM) which I'd have to say never struck me as creative at all, but has been a making/manufacturing activity where I see a certain elegance in some software designs and management styles. Then on the side for a while I was building an aeroplane from aluminium (two-seat, single engine, high wing) and really enjoyed the Making activity. I have a wish to build a wooden sailing boat in the foreseeable future too. It's Making, not sure about Creative.
 
TheBigYin said:
got into photography properly at 13 when my forms "home room" became one of the science labs, and there was a darkroom adjoining. Before that, I had music lessons (specifically piano) from the age of 9... Never saw that as particularly "creative" as it was all either theory or technique and playing other peoples music not writing anything of my own.
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Interestingly, I can read music but I prefer to play by ear. I don't have music lessons anymore but when I did I found that my music teacher could not improvise and I found that amazing, you know, I thought everyone could play by ear; and yet she could pick up any piece of music and just sight-read it -- I'd love to be able to do that, but not at the price of losing my improv ability.
 
I wouldn’t limit “creativity” to just the visual arts and humanities.
Just try and be any reasonable scientist or engineer or technician without creativity and see how far you get.

That said - I am just a snapper and have been since the late 60’s - no pretence to be anything other although just occasionally by serendipity I may get an OK shot

Was a mathematician then industrial physicist / engineer

Used to play a guitar a bit - classical and blues - but too time consuming - no natural aptitude and too many distractions.
 
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I used to enjoy Meccano. Does that count? Oh, and before I left primary school I could draw and read maps. But I don't see my photography as creative. I just shoot what I see.
 
Is the photography of 'things' as they are, creative at all? I mean, by taking a picture of something, all you have done is collect some light which is hardly 'creating' anything.
 
ShinySideUp said:
Is the photography of 'things' as they are, creative at all? I mean, by taking a picture of something, all you have done is collect some light which is hardly 'creating' anything.
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I'd say that there's a difference between "taking" a picture and "making" a picture.

in "taking" the picture, the creative aspect is transposing the image you have in your head of whats in front of you into the shot in the camera by means of manipulating the settings and waiting for the "decisive moment" - be that the right person walking through the shot, or just the perfect 5 seconds as the sun rises / sets where the colour of the light is just right.

in "making" the picture, it's more of a process like producing a movie - only with 1 frame not 90 minutes of 24 frames per second. You Visualise the end result, build a set, source or build the props, arrange the props to perfection, place the camera, and set the focal length and depth of field, add the light, tweak the light temperatures, shadows, light fall off and 1001 other things. and then, after hours (weeks, months) of faffing around, you press the shutter and walk away with a single frame that hopefully touches your soul.

Then in either case, you put them on here and 43 people look at them and 2 give you a thumbs up and one person says "nice shot" because they're on a run for the classifieds and want to increase their post numbers.

But both sides of it, to me at least, are definitely creative - one perhaps a little more "hands on creative" than the other.
 
ShinySideUp said:
Interestingly, I can read music but I prefer to play by ear. I don't have music lessons anymore but when I did I found that my music teacher could not improvise and I found that amazing, you know, I thought everyone could play by ear; and yet she could pick up any piece of music and just sight-read it -- I'd love to be able to do that, but not at the price of losing my improv ability.
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FWIW I could (possibly still can) sight-read for brass but never learned that for guitar where I naturally improv. It may well come from the different ways that I learned, where teaching was very formal for brass, and since everyone in a band has to work together there's no space to do your own thing. I do recall playing pieces from memory at times. With guitar it was all about listening to records and then trying to work out what was going on. My ear isn't great, but I can normally follow the changes through a song unless the chords get exotic, enough to play on top of what's going on.
 
TheBigYin said:
got into photography properly at 13 when my forms "home room" became one of the science labs, and there was a darkroom adjoining. Before that, I had music lessons (specifically piano) from the age of 9... Never saw that as particularly "creative" as it was all either theory or technique and playing other peoples music not writing anything of my own.

Strangely, around 15, I was dragged into joining a band with a couple of my mates, we were all into the heavier side of rock, and i took up bass (and guitar to a certain extent) - and the music theory i'd absorbed suddenly started to spill out into writing all kinds of stuff - none of it brilliant imo - but i was the only one in the band writing music - guitarist added his own solos and wrote some lyrics. After college, and earning a bit more £££ i bought a couple of keyboards, but would still mainly play bass in the bands I was in. I think to be honest it almost needed a different instrument to "unlock" the creative bit of my mind because I'd been so focussed on the lessons and exams for Piano which were pretty much all "classical" based pieces.
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Our form teacher was also the art teacher and our form room had a darkroom attached.
I think in the years I was there, I only ever knew of two of us who used it. Both of us had OM1n’s back then.
Also got to miss some lessons doing ‘photography’ for the school
 
ashishtamhane said:
+1

I am as far away from any art skills as Sagittarius A* is to Earth.

I do take some photos that some people like, but that's purely because of basic photography rules and a little bit of processing knowledge.

Also because its so easy to take photos with digital.
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I find that digital can be a double edged sword regards creativity. On the plus side you can experiment and see the immediate results rather than wait two weeks for the results to come back from the lab. On the negative side it allows people to become snap happy and lose any artistic purpose. George Bernard Shaw's quote: "A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity" has never been so true.

Personally I like to use old film cameras as they make me think more about composition and exposure.
 
I've been taking photos since I was 8 or 9. Are they any good? Well, when I first met my partner he had a camera too and it was sometimes interesting comparing our interpretations of the same place. I write a bit I sketch a bit. Any good? I don't think so. I definitely wouldn't consider myself creative. Spent my working life as an engineer in aerospace where it's best not to be too creative but sometimes a little bit helps. My partner plays the drums. I can't even tap a foot in time I wish I could paint but I've had a go and I can't. Baffles me how you mix colours.
I'm using my phone and its autocorrect is unbelievably creative....:D
 
ShinySideUp said:
Is the photography of 'things' as they are, creative at all? I
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I think its no different to playing a piece of music as written or acting a part as written.

On second thoughts it is, Photography of things as they are allows the photographer the creativity of choosing the camera angle, focal length, depth of field, the decisive moment etc,
 
I haven't counted up but it seems to me from skim reading the thread that there are more musicians than visual artists on this straw pole. That in itself seems interesting, I wonder if the sketchers, painters, cartoonists tend to regard photography as a means to an end, i.e. take photos to draw/paint from? Also there are fairly well established links between maths and music, are people who use internet forums and like cameras more likely to sit on the music-maths-technology axis?
 
sirch said:
I haven't counted up but it seems to me from skim reading the thread that there are more musicians than visual artists on this straw pole. That in itself seems interesting, I wonder if the sketchers, painters, cartoonists tend to regard photography as a means to an end, i.e. take photos to draw/paint from? Also there are fairly well established links between maths and music, are people who use internet forums and like cameras more likely to sit on the music-maths-technology axis?
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I do think photography feeds into a similar area of my thoughts as sketching/drawing. I also think that there are many people that are way more creative in their photography than I am or have been.

As for the music-maths link, I don't consider myself to be particularly good at either. That said, I made a career out of engineering, so can't be too bad at maths I guess. And, our band never got booed out of anywhere, so I suppose that wasn't too bad either.
 
I used to draw and make models when I was a kid. My father was into photography so I guess that is where I also get that interest from. I got my first camera when I was about 11 and have always had a camera since, but only got back into photography seriously about 15 years ago. Having a family and long hours at work always seemed to get in the way. As I'm getting older I want to do more photography and have started to make models again, you never know I might even start drawing again.
 
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sirch said:
I haven't counted up but it seems to me from skim reading the thread that there are more musicians than visual artists on this straw pole. That in itself seems interesting, I wonder if the sketchers, painters, cartoonists tend to regard photography as a means to an end, i.e. take photos to draw/paint from? Also there are fairly well established links between maths and music, are people who use internet forums and like cameras more likely to sit on the music-maths-technology axis?
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I did once put together a video of my still images and wrote a sax and guitar soundtrack to go with them; it was rubbish though, as I couldn't be bothered to learn a video editing package so as to do it properly.
 
ancient_mariner said:
FWIW I could (possibly still can) sight-read for brass but never learned that for guitar where I naturally improv. It may well come from the different ways that I learned, where teaching was very formal for brass, and since everyone in a band has to work together there's no space to do your own thing. I do recall playing pieces from memory at times. With guitar it was all about listening to records and then trying to work out what was going on. My ear isn't great, but I can normally follow the changes through a song unless the chords get exotic, enough to play on top of what's going on.
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I know when you say 'band' you are talking about [perhaps] a brass band or suchlike but I used to be in a band (as in guitars, drums etc) playing sax and at the end we had two and a half hours of original music we could do and not one note was written down; most of the solos were improvised too. The pubs we went to seemed to appreciate it.
 
Music, but from early on that overlapped with photography for decades. My job involves designing and writing scientific projects and generating illustrations for funding applications and publications.
 
sirch said:
I haven't counted up but it seems to me from skim reading the thread that there are more musicians than visual artists on this straw pole. That in itself seems interesting, I wonder if the sketchers, painters, cartoonists tend to regard photography as a means to an end, i.e. take photos to draw/paint from? Also there are fairly well established links between maths and music, are people who use internet forums and like cameras more likely to sit on the music-maths-technology axis?
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There are a number of 'famous' photographers who started out in the graphic arts and Cartier-Bresson gave up photography to paint and draw. (He should have stuck with photography...) Not so many started out as musicians as far as I know. Although St Ansel of Yosemite was a pianist.

sirch said:
I think its no different to playing a piece of music as written or acting a part as written.

On second thoughts it is, Photography of things as they are allows the photographer the creativity of choosing the camera angle, focal length, depth of field, the decisive moment etc,
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Framing too. Creative framing can alter the whole meaning of a photograph depending on what is included and excluded.
 
juggler said:
I think.. people don't often self-identify as creative.
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Though they might do if it's seen as a marketable label & they're trying to sell themselves as such ;). Or if they're a copywriter. Etc etc ....
 
There's actors and actors. You can't compare Bill Roach (Ken Barlow) with eg Ken Branagh, the latter bringing a superb sense of emotion and timing to anything he does, which is wonderfully creative. Ditto the point about snappers and photographers, and it goes for other unlikely fields - there's a big difference between a pilot and an aviator in my view, the first can operate an aircraft successfully (most of the time) but the second has a feel for both the machine and the environment it operates in, can read the clouds and air to make decisions. That, in its own way, is creative, because it implies a "oneness" with the context of what the person is experiencing. Isn't that creativity?
 
ShinySideUp said:
I know when you say 'band' you are talking about [perhaps] a brass band or suchlike but I used to be in a band (as in guitars, drums etc) playing sax and at the end we had two and a half hours of original music we could do and not one note was written down; most of the solos were improvised too. The pubs we went to seemed to appreciate it.
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That first band was a military band playing brass instruments (plus a couple of drummers). I also play in Gospel bell still - the band is generally acoustic guitar/mando, acoustic/electric slide, bass and a couple of cajon players - and like you, we have a couple of hours of songs (I can't call them originals, because they're all old gospel and country songs) for which we have each created our own parts. Solos are always improv, though usually of a character to suit the song. I've never once seen sheet music, although for one song we did had a sheet with sords and chords. The music isn't complex, but it's often fun.
 
sirch said:
Yes but they are not here debating the benefits of one camera over another ;)
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TBH very few of us do that here these days, and not even one lens over another (which makes more difference) all *that* much.
 
Really, apart from a few foibles here and there, there are no bad cameras anymore, and really, no bad lenses either. I was just perusing the used lens market and there some excellent lenses to be had (for the DSLR, which I use) but over the years, I've tried loads, but it all comes down in the end to could I take better photographs if I had 'this' camera or 'that' lens and the answer is sadly 'no'; and there, at long last, endeth my GAS. After decades of trial and error, I have finally realised (oh, it took so long) that main problem with my photography is not my equipment, it's the idiot peering through the viewfinder. These days, I take one of my two cameras -- the nearest one usually -- with whatever lens happens to be attached and just go out photographing; I've found it to be quite cathartic, the pressure has gone and I can create to my hearts content.
 
Since man is made in the image of God our creator, it's hardly surprising that we exhibit creative traits. I built a model railway layout for my son many years ago also a creative activity.
 
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lindsay said:
.. there's a big difference between a pilot and an aviator in my view, the first can operate an aircraft successfully (most of the time) but the second has a feel for both the machine and the environment it operates in, can read the clouds and air to make decisions. That, in its own way, is creative, because it implies a "oneness" with the context of what the person is experiencing. Isn't that creativity?
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It certainly embodies a certain fluency. Lots of words, including creativity, have a range of meanings ... which often makes communication difficult.
 
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