Fueled by Creativity

 

As a writer, creativity is my adrenaline. But it isn’t limited to writing. Lately, I’ve been spending much of my creative energy on thinking up ideas for my camera club.

As acting president, I have taken on the responsibility of finding speakers or, failing that, coming up with my own program ideas. For this month, I asked someone to put together a presentation on creating creative photos using the entries in the club’s recent Mylinda Cane Creative Photo Competition as the examples. My responsibility also means coming up with activities for the annual meeting to fill in the extra time. For that, I’ve created everything from a crossword puzzle with the names of famous photographers to a word seek puzzle of photography vocabulary and a game where participants guess the subject of a photograph from a small detail.

The photo at the top of this post is one of my poorer attempts to be creative for my camera club. We have a competition every month with regular categories for color and monochrome photos and a special that changes monthly. I know how hard it is to come up with a different idea every month because I do the same for the member photo section of the club’s newsletter. Our club is a member of a group of clubs, however, and fortunately the competition special is chosen by someone from the umbrella club so I don’t have to worry about it.

Our local club does the same topic one month earlier so that our members can decide whether their photos will do well enough to enter them into the larger competition at the umbrella club. Usually, that isn’t a problem. But the January special is “Happy New Year,” and the new year hadn’t happened yet when our local club had its competition. That meant finding something in the archives or staging a new photo. We can enter up to three photos in each category, and I found one in the archives that would work in a pinch, but I had nothing else that even implied “Happy New Year.” My motive for entering was not to win but because I was afraid that if only one person entered, he or she would be competing against him-or-herself, and that’s no fun. So I looked around at the props I had on hand and created the photo at the top of this post. In the end, I didn’t enter it or the one from the archives because nobody else from my competition class entered, either.

Still, it got me thinking about the importance of creativity in the arts. For me, of course, that’s primarily writing. Over the years, I have done a number of blog posts about writing creatively, and I decided this was a good month to reprint them.

So stay tuned.