The title of this article is, “The Modern Photographer has Lost Creativity.” But it really should be more like, “The Modern Photographer has Lost Creativity because they do not look into the past, read, or negotiate for their rights so that they can make better work.” A lot of things have added to the loss of creativity by photographers. First off, it has to do with technology becoming so good. I’ve said it many times before: the technology keeps getting better, but photographers don’t seem to be keeping up. I started to really see this over a decade ago when photographers stopped learning how to use strobe and instead used Photoshop to do everything for them. To them, a composite is the same thing as a photograph. But it really isn’t.

If you were to look at several images these days, you’ll see that photographers have tried to turn everything into a very flat photograph. By that I mean that they don’t let the highlights clip and they let the shadows become shallow with little to no depth.

Photographers, not everything needs to be completely flat. If someone says that the highlights are too hot, who cares? Is it achieving the effect that you want? Excellent, so keep them. Keep the contrast in your images. Not everything needs to be so incredibly flat and so insanely blah.

And more importantly, not everything needs to just have orange and purple or teal and orange.

Photographers: the reason why people are using AI and have stopped respecting the craft that we do is because we’re not making work that is irreplaceable. To that end, we’ve stopped making ourselves irreplaceable. Instead, photographers work to create images that they’ve seen elsewhere. This in part thanks to social media. The other part has to do with photographers doing work for too little money and not wanting to spend more time on their work. When in reality, you really just have to make special things happen in-camera that can’t be easily duplicated in post-production.

Technology is surely important, but it’s not going to do the work for you and you shouldn’t let tech completely do the work for you either. Instead, you should let it achieve your creative vision without making it tell you what your intent is. And here are some tips on how you can do that:

・Set everything to manual: white balance, focusing, shutter speed, ISO, etc. Set everything to manual.

・Come up with a concept without looking at moodboards. Instead, ideate by writing a list with a pen and paper

・Of the items on that list, circle the one that’s easiest to make

・Do word associations

・Don’t take influence from any visual media that you’ve seen. Ideally, read stories instead. You’ll see that your reading stamina and creative stamina will take a major boost.

・Turn off the exposure preview setting so that the camera can’t show you what your image is going to look like

・Make your shadow so dark you can’t see anything in them.

・Let the highlights blind your viewer.