My comfort zone is color photography. I love colors – vivid, saturated, those that pop out. Whether nature, animals, landscapes or whatever, color is for me. I’m most efficient, expressive and comfortable working with colors; they are my box of crayons, my palette of acrylic and I will paint using the camera as my brush and the world as my canvas. I am an image maker, and a colorist for the most part.
Now you know what for me is getting out of my comfort zone. That is the world of black and white. I have been photographing for many years now and black and white photography is a very recent exploration for me. And I feel inadequate. Not that I’m expecting too much of myself on this area but seeing the black and white photographs of blogger friends (six of them are featured in this issue), I feel that they do these images so effortlessly, with style and panache. Sure I have a whole section of black and white images in my Monographs gallery and picture series, yet these are experimentations, excursions into the unknown, areas outside of my comfort zone, the results of which I myself am not totally satisfied.
Maybe these are just baseless delusions on my part but then that is the natural tendency – we are unnerved when we explore unfamiliar territory. Landscape photographer and writer Ian Plant offers some wisdom and counsel in his article Break Free From Your Comfort Zone. He suggests that we 1) get off the beaten path, 2) find new perspectives, 3) master the moment, 4) make motion our subject, 5 ) shoot unconventional light, 6) embrace our flaws, and 7) be there on the scene. Read in full this very engaging article for a deeper understanding of the subject.
In summary, experiment, immerse yourself and practice the art of photography. As Ian said in his opening sentence: “Familiarity can hamper creativity.” Dare to do what is new to you and discover other photographic possibilities. Because in doing so, you also discover something of yourself.
Getting out of your comfort zone