 every time you've tried to be creative and it's slipped through your fingers. I'm sure you feel that frustration. You go, why? I'm surrounded by all these inspirational things. And yet I can't be creative. I'm not feeling it. How is it that the other people around you can seem to just turn on creativity at a whim and you find it's so hard to grasp that thing that when more that you reach for it, the more it seems to slip through your fingers. How amazing would it be to be confident in being creative? To not actually have to worry for, not to be afraid to be a battle, but a dance. I'm gonna show you a simple technique that is gonna allow you to tap into that confidence and to be able to switch on that creativity at a whim. How's it, how's it? Have you ever heard the expression that a confused mind says no? So that's when there are so many choices being confronted and being pondered by your brain that eventually just short-circuits and it's like, oh, I can't do this anymore. I've just, I had enough, boom, and it closes down. That's what's happening with your mind when you are trying to force creativity through your photography, that you are thinking about so many things and your mind's going in so many different directions that it's just, you don't know where to start. Eventually it just becomes a muddle in the mess. At photography's heart, it is really, it's sight. It was born in the laboratory and we can harness that to our benefit by thinking about photography as a science, that there are certain elements that we put together. And I found this formula that I'm gonna share with you today extremely helpful for me whenever I've been stuck for creativity, when I feel that I'm just going all over the place and I don't really know how to get back on track because I can take a step back, think about this formula, think about where in this formula I'm going wrong and then get back on board. And this is what I'm gonna share with you today. This simple three-step formula that is going to help you be creative on demand to overcome that frustration that sometimes you feel when you are trying to force creativity and it just doesn't seem to want to be coming. The first element in this formula is surprisingly gear. And a lot of people are going, why Alex is talking about gear? But that is the thing, that is a constant. We know what it does. Everybody who's ever taken a photograph has used a camera of some description, photography was born in the laboratory. And so it's great that we have these things that do the same result irrespective of where we are, what we're doing, what the weather conditions are doing. You know, a 35 millimeter lens will always look at the world like a 35 millimeter lens will, just as much as a 200 millimeter lens will look at the world in a slightly different way. And my lens will see the world exactly the same way as yours does. So when we understand how these are used, how they see the world, how they work, then we have a constant in our formula. So we don't need to really worry about that too much. Obviously we can pick and choose that constant. But this is the whole point that you need to know your gear. You need to understand its limitations, what it's capable of, you know, and how it ties into the other two crucial aspects of this formula. The second part of the formula is technique. This is where obviously how you decide to use the piece of gear that you've chosen, you know, how to approach it. So are you going to use long shutter speeds? Are you going to use slow shutter speeds? Are you going to think about black and white? Are you going to use a process where you decide what I'm going to do this later on in Photoshop? And if so, what choices do you need to make? So this is a very crucial aspect of being creative is that you are now starting to take that gear that you have chosen to use and you are going to then use it in a certain way. So this is the technique. So you can sort of see how this is starting to build up that you're compartmentalizing all the approaches of taking a photograph and making it systematic. So it makes it a lot easier. So you can start focusing on the real nugget of gold within all of this, which of course is the third aspect to your creative vision. So the third aspect, of course, it's vision. Yes, it's how you see the world. This is not a constant. This is the arbitrary thing where I think people start to get a little bit lost and kind of go, well, I don't have any vision. And the thing is that you do have a vision. Why ever you want to see the thing in front of you, the thing that inspired you, the thing that intrigued you, then how you want to show it is your vision. It is as simple as that. He says, tripping over some of his words, but it is really that simple. It's you see something that inspires you and you go, oh, I'd like to express it this way. And that is where the problem comes in. The whole thing sort of falls apart because without this formula, then you don't really know where to start. So how do you apply this in your photographic endeavors? Well, the very first thing you want to do is focus on vision. When you get to a scene, when you'll see something, oh, I quite like to photograph that, take a moment to not rip out your camera and go, oh, I'm going to set it to F, one point, whatever, because wide aperture stuff is all of the norm with the rage or what have you. Just take a moment and think about how you picture the scene. What is the photograph that you want to make? And so Adam's in his three books, The Print the Negative and the Camera, talked about this, it's called like visualization, sort of thinking about how the finished images is probably going to look. And you don't have to get that full on into it, but what you'd like to do is just sort of set, and take a moment, just enjoy the thing that you are going to photograph. If it's a person, spend some time talking to them. If it's a landscape, just take a moment to be in the landscape. When you take time to divorce yourself from the camera and the technique, you're giving yourself time to think about that one thing, that one element which is your vision, rather than clouding your ideas with how you're going to do the thing, how you're going to translate that vision into a photograph. It's once you have that vision that you can then approach the gear. You say, okay, well, fine, if this is what I want to say in my photograph, this is how I want the scene to look. What are my gear choices? What are my lens choices? How am I going to use the equipment at my disposal to bring what I see up here into life? How am I going to capture it? So the second part, once you've now got this vision, is to think about the gear. What lens choices? What equipment is going to be best suited for you to express your vision in a certain way? So this is when you focus purely on your gear. This doesn't really take too much because especially if you know about the limitations, as I said, about your equipment. So once you've made those decisions about the equipment, you can then start thinking about the technique. How are you going to use that equipment? How are you going to use composition? How are you going to use shutter speeds and apertures? And these are all the technique things. Once you've, you're not trying to think about the whole thing as a whole. You're just thinking about individual components and you're putting them together like a formula, like Lego blocks, like ingredients in a recipe. Can you see how this is all building up? It's not destroying your creativity. It is unleashing it. It's making you more confident in the process because you know where to start. You know how to capture the thing in front of you that has moved and to create a photograph that hopefully other people will go, wow, that's really great. I'm so, so that's amazing. How did you see that? Because you're approaching it sensibly. You're approaching it in a systematic fashion that makes sense. And obviously, as you get better at this, as you become more confident in this process and more adept at it, then the process goes quicker. A lot of it becomes automatic. The gear part of this will become so inconsequential as you get better at this that it happens almost naturally like a synapse firing in your brain. And that's why you see some other people who seem to be able to just turn on this creativity on a whim. In this formula, there were two constants. So that there's gear and there's technique. Those are things that you can learn fairly easily to produce results that look the same time and time again. But what about vision? How do you improve your vision? How do you take something that is completely intangible and unique to you and polish it and hone it? I put together a video which I'm going to link to you over here which will talk to you about how to find those secret photographs that seem to be just dripping out of every other photographer's camera. Thanks for watching. I'll see you again later.