 We have all been there at some point when we sit there in a photoshoot and boom, the creative juice is just dry up. So what are we going to do about it? How's it? How's it? Yes, we have all been there, haven't we? That we're sitting there, you know, doing some photoshoots and then it's just like, oh, I don't know what to do. It's a terrible feeling. Well, today I'm going to show you some ways that you can top up all the juice in that creative battery so that it's never going to run dry ever again. To find inspiration for your photography, we're going to turn initially to the most obvious source of inspiration. That is other photographers themselves. Regular viewers of the channel will know that I am a huge, huge, huge fan of photographer monographs and I have very much enjoyed getting inspiration from the work of great photographers, both past and present. And if you are new to photography, then probably a really great thing for you to do is to go on to somebody like Amazon and type in the name of a photographer whom you know, to answer Adams or somebody like that. And they will, along the bottom, it says customers who bought this also bought this. And that's a really good way of discovering names of photographers. If you go into Google and you search famous photographers, it will give you a list of names across the top that you can then go and explore and use that as little rabbit holes to go and discover photographers who you don't know because the biggest problem with photography and finding photography that you will enjoy is that you can't go searching for a photographer if you don't know their name. It seems a blatantly obvious thing to say, but if you don't know the name of a photographer, how can you go and look them up? So from this day forward, go and seek out photography, go to exhibitions, go to galleries, go to bookstores and browse through the monographs, go online and spend an hour or two falling down this rabbit hole. Go on Instagram, if that's the thing that you like doing, go on there. All of these are viable places for you to find inspiration from. Make notes, you know, think about things, but just look as much photography as you possibly can because that's the way that you are going to start to fill up this bank. So that's the kind of obvious one out of the way. They've gone now. So the next thing, it's not a huge leap, but is to go beyond the realms of photography and to look at the moving image. So film and television and especially television which in the last, let's say, 15, 20 years has changed radically in the way that it looks. It is cinematic almost in its quality. And those of us who experience television in sort of the 1970s and 1980s and all the TV shows then will, I think, recognize how much it has improved. And both of those mediums, film and television, are a hugely rich resource of inspiration, visual inspiration. And something that I used to do, and I should still do this and I would implore you to do it as well, is if an idea, if you see something on the screen and you go, that's a really cool idea, jot down the still image because quite often the still image from a moving picture, and I'm not talking about the technical things, but if you had a scene and you went, oh, that's a still, right, can look very different to how, say, a photograph might be composed. So if you think like somebody like Cindy Sherman, for example, you know with her untitled film stills sections, that those are supposed to be stills from a film. And there's a couple of other photographers whom I will put some examples up who also sort of fall into this kind of area where they are drawing inspiration from the moving picture. And I would certainly implore that you go and don't just dismiss this because it's not photography per se. So still in the art world, but we're going to move just a little bit, a little bit further away from photography. And that's actual painting. And of course, photography on its release, when it was released, hey, we've released photography, here you go, here's photography 0.1, it's in beta, right? That photography influenced people like Degas and all that sort of thing. And it changed the way that they painted and it made it more modern for them. And it may seem a bit weird going back like 100 years or so to find inspiration for things in the modern era. But if we start doing that, then you're going to start pulling your inspiration from beyond the places where most people find their inspiration. So we talked about monographs. And that of course, is an obvious place. But what happened is when you are drawing inspiration from the same person who has influenced tens of thousands of other photographers, no, you want to make your work have more flavor, have more depth. So when you start looking beyond the confines of photography and the moving image into the art world, then you start drawing on a much wider pool of inspiration. Think about it like, you know, like a watering hole, we've all seen those watering holes on the nature shows, where all the animals around there, they're drinking from the water and it gets smaller, smaller, smaller as the drier season goes on, it becomes a mucky, muddy sludge. And I think that's what's happening with photography online, is that the pool of inspiration that people are drawing from is getting smaller and smaller and smaller because of the nature of how photography is promoted online. And it is ending up with this muddy sludge and that's not really benefiting anybody at all really. So go and look at artwork. Go to an art gallery. If it's a place like the National Portrait Gallery in London that does both painting and photography, then even better. But you don't want to just go anywhere that has art that you can look at and you can spend time being influenced by. Go and seek it out. Sometimes the best way to be inspired is to actually not think of anything at all. I love to sit sometimes just with a coffee and looking out over in my garden and just letting my mind wander to let it do its own thing for a while. If you'd like to help me out in this thought process by buying me a coffee, there's a link in the description below. At this juncture in the video, it is probably a good idea to talk about the difference between being inspired by something and blatant copying. Blatant copying is pointless and it's stupid. I won't say it's theft because that's a whole again murky water of its own. But what's the point of just blatantly copying something unless it's very technical exercise? Blatantly copying something and saying that that's original work is ridiculous. So don't go down that route. However, do be aware that everything is a remix. Now I've gone against Alex's rule here and I've blatantly taken that title and that heading from a video that was doing the rounds on YouTube a couple of years ago called Everything Is A Remix. And unfortunately, that video has disappeared into the ether. I can't find any why I would link to it below. But in that video, the author proposed that as creative people, we don't produce anything unique that's wholly original because we are influenced by so many things. So what we are actually doing is drawing in influences from all sorts of things and remixing them in our head and creating something that is then unique to us. So if you are obsessed, if you are hamstrung by this idea that you need to as a creative person create wholly original work that has never been done before. And so what you're doing is you're trying to find things that have never been photographed before. Then you're kind of missing slightly the point here is that everything that you can think of has been done before. Right? Even if you go, oh, what could I think of that? Nobody said, I know, dust under the bed. Nobody's done that. Oh, man, Ray did this. Right? So you can sort of see that there is there is nothing really original to photograph. What you can do is take all these elements and combine them in a unique way. That's when you're starting to get into the original content and and things like that. And if you want to photograph things as homage to people, then by all means do so. Right? Nobody here is allowed to tell you what you should or should not photograph, how you want to photograph it. Right? There is a photographer called Tyler Shields who in certain circles has been accused of being just a blatant copyist of a famous art that's gone before him. Now I think that that's a kind of a bit, that's extremely unfair because we are all copying to some degree. We all thought you're taking our ideas from things. And if Tyler Shields wants to create photography that looks similar to stuff that's gone before him, then why shouldn't he? Right? It's not a matter for these other people to say what is or not worthy of being photographed. Tyler Shields is not creating forgeries. You know, if you create a picture that looks like an urban pen composition or, you know, something like that, you're not creating, because you're not saying this is an urban pen photograph, so please pay me lots, lots of money for it. You are saying this is my photograph. If the idea within that photograph is something that has been used before, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Now I'm probably going to get a bit of pushback from this, but I do feel that it's worth at least opening this discussion. And I'll be interested to hear what you say in the comments below, because I do feel that there is a lot of self-imposed problems that we put upon ourselves as photographers, that we put ourselves into little boxes and labels and things of that nature. And so we must photograph this. We mustn't do that. And ultimately just forget that, you know, what we do is for ourselves. We are an outlet of expression. We are not trying to pull the wall over somebody's eyes. We are not trying to pretend that our photography is taken by somebody else. We are just being expressive. So remember that idea. Take it and hold onto it and go with the flow. Just be your own photographer. If you are struggling for inspiration within whatever you're finding, your well of creativity has dried up, look beyond photography. Anything that inspires you, anything that piques your interest can be inspirational. Use those notebooks, write down ideas, keep them there. You never know when you might come up. And I'm sure that you're never going to have this problem ever again of being in the middle of a shoot and your session has just gone poof. It's always a great idea when people share the things that inspire them, because while it may not be just something that is going to be a direct inspiration for somebody else, it can at least help kickstart people's journeys about where to seek out inspiration, because we all get inspired by different things. I don't think you could ever find a definitive list of things to be inspired by. But I would love to hear from you what sort of things inspire you that are not specifically photography related.