Mastering the art of the rinky-tink-tink: part two

I can’t claim any state of zen with my point-and-shoot camera. Most days, it takes near-herculean restraint to not chuck it off the end of the nearest wharf.

Taught my three-year-old several new curse words this weekend trying to capture him indoors — the NERVE! — where my press-down-halfway-and-hope-for-the-best pipsqueak stubbornly refuses to focus.

But a less-than-SLR camera need not be a creative crutch. Right? Right.

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I'd like to think that creativity is more than 'have’ or ‘have-not’. To accept the "you've got it, and you don't" myth would be utterly demoralizing on those days when I'm feeling photographically tapped — those days, I'd rather take a deep breath and say to myself It's not just me being inherently dull, or hopelessly all-thumbs with a camera. I'm just forgetting something, getting lazy.

Here's what helps me get my groove back — before pressing the shutter, an ABC of creative checkpoints:

ANGLE. Take risks. Lie on your belly. Crouch. Get up on a chair. Try a few without looking through the viewfinder, if an inventive angle requires it. Before turning away from a scene or subject, take at least two or three more unconventional angles or stances. When I start to get bored, chances are good it's because I've spent too much time with the camera at eye-level.

BACKGROUND. Do a visual inventory of everything around your subject — passerby, traffic, signage, household clutter — and change your stance to minimize visual distractions. Do whatever it takes for a clean frame, because there's some law of photography physics that assures the expression of a lifetime will occur in the one frame of a hundred that includes the potbellied guy standing stage left with the MASTER BAIT & TACKLE t-shirt.

COMPOSITION. At the last moment, look through the lens abstractly to consider the shapes, lines and balance formed by your subject and surroundings. Reduce what you see to blocks of colour and pattern, and respond to that stripped-down vision from the gut. This always leads me towards what often feels counter-intuitive, or quirkier than rule-of-thirds. While it may not always work, it's always worth a try to tilt, shift and crop for more mindful composition — as opposed to everything is inside the frame and no one’s got a finger up the nose: check.

If you’re an enthusiastic enough photographer to be here, you know all this already. But it’s forgetting these basics that gets me stuck in snapshotty ruts — and blaming those ruts on my wharf-bound pipsqueak.

Which, in the absence of something better, doesn’t do any favours for me or the Kodak.