The Most Effective Ways to Develop a Photography Concept

In The Beginning

As a Perth based photographer in a creative landscape, I believe It’s common when it comes to developing a photography concept for us to believe that creativity or being creative is a skill that you either have or you don’t have.

This belief can be a factor in why we are not chasing our passions.

But that’s not true

The truth is we are all creative in our own unique ways, every single one of us. The difference is some of us know how to tap into it more often than others.

Creativity is a mindset, it’s how we perceive things, our worldview, the frames in which we reinforce our beliefs and situations differently than others who are around us.

Finding new ways to alternatively see the world around us, especially through a camera viewfinder to develop new concepts requires consistent hard work, but it becomes easier with time.

Sometimes, we get lost in our own thoughts, resulting in paralysis by analysis or simply don’t know how to come up with any new ideas for our photography concepts.

So in this blog, I thought I would share my process and tips I use all the time to create new and unique photography concepts and turn them into amazing pictures.

It’s all part of The Pursuit of Photography

In The Middle

Feel What You Feel

In my opinion, this is the most important process to unlocking creativity when it comes to developing photography concepts.

Because photography is about the depth of feeling not the depth of field, your emotions, your feelings are unlimited potential waiting to radiate your mind and your heart.

Amazing ideas come from your emotions, from your feelings, from your heart, from what you feel deep beneath the exterior.

This idea of trusting your emotions can be very hard to understand and even more to put it in practice because most of us don’t like to feel our emotions, we rather run away from them and hide.

Your emotions are the gateway to creative photography concept success.

Feel your emotions, listen to your heart, trust what your mind is speaking to you and take a pen, a piece of paper, and start to write how you are feeling, write it all down, every thought.

Write a story from what you’re feeling, this becomes your map, your north star, your guiding light.

Pick Out Your Idea and Flourish It

Your emotions have transferred from heart, to pen, to paper, filling up your once empty piece of paper with deep colours.

Your concept is coming together, nothing is turning into something, what’s hidden is being discovered.

It might look like an emotional A-bomb exploded causing nothing but an emotional wreck, but have another look, look closer as you re-read what you’ve written in a few minutes, tomorrow, or in a few days and piece together how you could turn that wreck into a new photography concept in front of your lens.

How could you express this idea? What would you need? Who would you need? Where do I need to go?

Create a scene that reflects what was in your head and now on paper, how you felt in that moment.

Visualise and let your imagination run wild and free.

Other people don’t need to understand how you feel and how you express yourself through your photographs, its subjective to the viewer.

You can make what you feel as obvious or as abstract as you want. The concept, the emotion, the feeling, or the story you want to share with the world is the original idea, but from that something completely different can blossom.

Look For The Message Within Your Emotions

Once I have come to understand what my emotions are speaking to me and I have it all written down on paper I look for the message amongst the chaos.

Your photography concept will come together perfectly when you take what you’re feeling, the raw emotions deep inside and figure out the unforgettable message you want to send to your viewers.

There’s a message within your emotions

Send it loud and clear.

Think about your message, what do you want to say? How do you want your viewers to feel? How do you want them to react? What do you want them to do after viewing your photograph?

You want to be able to connect with your community, the viewers who gaze their eyes upon your work in a deep and meaningful way. It’s how they will get to know you, understand and remember you.

Your message has to matter to you or else it won’t ever matter to your community.

This Is The End

Never feel satisfied with what you’ve done, always persist to push beyond your limits, feel your emotions deeper and deeper.

It’s easy to produce something anyone can do, to imitate others’ photographs, or photograph the same thing every day. Which is ok by the way (I’ll get into this in another blog)

But, it takes courage, persistence, self- awareness, resilience a deep understanding of one’s self to create a unique photography concept.

The process or tips I have mentioned above is a starting point, something that works for me. So, don’t be afraid to make it better, because it definitely won’t work for every photographer

Test, try, test again, see what works, see what doesn’t work and change things up.

If it’s one thing I truly believe and the one thing I want you to take away from this blog is to look for ideas deep within your emotions, from the heart and not on a screen.

It’s great to gather inspiration from the external, and it helps as well, but truly great photography concepts come from inside not the outside.

I have other articles in my Lifestyle Blog that are useful in changing your limited beliefs of yourself and unlocking your absolute full potential. Take a read!