I need to get out and shoot. This is a phrase that I and all of my friends have said a multitude of times. What it really means is I need to get up off my butt and open my creative eye and find something to photograph. Or change my perspective and shoot it a different way.
A lot of times when we are following our same old trails our creative eye becomes lazy. For some reason going someplace new opens up all these possibilities in our mind as to what my next shot is going to be. Or we see things and then immediately foresee its captured future and how it would look after it has been processed in the digital dark room.
One of my favorite subjects to shoot is theater and performing arts. One of the places that gives me a great opportunity to do this is Six Flags. My family and I know many of the people who perform there. This makes it a more personable situation. I enjoy being able to share my results with them and their friends and family as opposed to only showing my work to those who either stumble across my gallery or blog. Six Flags also allows my family to enjoy themselves as well as I play with my passion.
But I have realized that outside of shooting the shows I don’t often put the camera to my eye. It could be because everything is so familiar there. It could be because sometimes the park is crazy busy and I don’t want to get in other peoples way or have my gear damaged. It could just be because I am not exploring my creative eye. Will I change? Maybe. Sometimes I enjoy just spending time with my family and purposely leave the camera in the off position. A well balanced life is crucial to long term happiness.
But this day, as we walked past the small man made lake, my attention was focused on making a picture. I had the final image in mind, and had to be a little patient waiting for the wind to place my subject into position. It took a little maneuvering to position myself in a way that I wasn’t going to see the ride just left of frame, or the Ice cream shop straight ahead. I initially wanted to capture a little more of the dock coming in from frame left, but decided there was just too much trash in the water that I didn’t want to clean up in post. Not sure if you call that lazy, or getting it right in camera, either way it saved me hours.
I am extremely happy with the end result, but more importantly I enjoyed shooting a scene that I have walked by probably hundreds of times and never raised my camera to. I am not sure what drew my attention to it this day. It could have been the way the sky was illuminating it. Maybe the contrast in the color of the leaves against the boat, or water. But what ever it was I am thankful I stopped and spent the 5 minutes looking at it a little different that day.
As always you can click the image or here to go to my gallery and pull up a much larger version. And the next time you are wondering about in normal surroundings and you have a minute think about it creatively. Even if you don’t have your camera with you.
Fall Day at the Lake
Always A Click Away 
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