By Wayne Cosshall 

We all have them, the Creative Blahs, or CBs. Lugging the camera bag seems like hard work. You can’t be bothered going out. Or you go to a normally fertile place photographically, and nothing happens. Maybe you take one or two bad shots just so you can say you shot something. Even worse, you have a client shoot tomorrow and you have absolutely no idea what you will do. What do you do?

All creative people go through dry spells. It is natural not to be on your game all the time. The important thing is to not allow the CBs to pull you down even deeper or set you up for a long creative outage. Most of us who are old enough to have dealt with many episodes of the CBs will have developed one or more breakout strategies. What are yours?

Keep an Idea Book. If you’re like some people, you may keep a scrapbook or clippings book where you put inspiring images as you come across them. When experiencing the CBs you flick through your clipping book, looking for something, anything, that will break you loose and make you want to create. A variation on the clipping book is the ideas book, where you write all the great photographic ideas that you don’t currently have time to shoot. Whatever you do, great ideas or inspiration need to be captured somehow. This is a digital age, so rather than clip, why not scan and organize?

Visit the Library or Magazine Store. Another variation is to visit the library (either your personal one or a local public or university library), and flip through the books and magazines. Or, check out the magazine store. This is a breakout method I use a lot. I usually head off to Borders (which has a good selection of Australian, US and UK photo and art mags), flick through, and see if anything inspires. If so, I buy the magazine, take it home, and analyze the images that caught my attention. Suddenly, instead of feeling the CBs, I’m in problem-solving mode.

As a magazine writer and publisher myself, I don’t buy lots of photo mags on a regular basis. There are just too many of them and most tend to repeat the same ideas if you read them for too long. (Of course I am not talking about my magazine.)

You know the deal: If it is fall there will be articles on shooting leaves, autumn colors, etc. But certain mags can usually inspire me. Those I check out and buy. And new magazines are always arriving on the scene. I also look through art magazines and certain interior-decorating magazines. Many of these show great art, in use, and can be very inspiring.

Go someplace new. Sometimes all you need to do is go somewhere new. Holidays always seem to stimulate the photographic urge, but even in your own city or town there will be places where you have not shot. Go seek them out.

Try shooting differently. If you can’t go somewhere new, try shooting in a new way. Try crawling around your house with your camera at ground level. Shoot everything with flash or everything with the lens focused at two feet away. Try shooting at that 3200ISO setting you never use. You get the idea. If you normally go out shooting with a bag of lenses, pick one (ideally a single focal length lens) and go out only with that.

When you are shooting somewhere new, or doing things in a different way, or shooting with some limitation, you automatically shift into problem-solving mode.

Problem solving is the key to getting unstuck and motivated again. Why? Because the process of problem solving requires concentration and focus. It forces you to stop thinking about having the CBs. If you can forget about the CBs long enough, you won’t have them anymore. This is a mental trick I’ve taught over the years to both workshop participants and university students. It usually works. Even if the cause of your CBs is something outside of yourself or photography, problem solving still works because the concentration and focus move you away from worrying about paying bills, getting fired, the state of the world, or that argument with your partner.

CBs may be a fact of life but you don’t have to be stuck with them. In fact, I’ve found that sometimes the CBs can be the trigger to a new level of work, because in seeking something new to release the CBs, I open up something new in myself.’

This image came out of an episode of the Creative Blahs (CBs). After forcing myself to visit a part of the city edge I’d never been to before, I discovered some interesting sites. When I returned the next day with a camera, I captured the 10 or so images that make up this composite image and broke free of the Creative Blahs.