Tag: photography

I think with the recent publicity of Instagram’s new policy on who owns the copyright of the images you upload has started making many people wonder.. “should I use Instagram or not”?, particularly if you are uploading all your professional creative works to the social media platform, but I believe that Instagram does have its place in any designer’s app arsenal. It can actually be a really useful and beneficial tool to all creatives and here is why I think so.

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Raising Awareness

The benefit to any budding photographer, artist or graphic designer is obvious. It can show to others what you are capable of and also how you see the world. Creatives see the world in a slightly different way than a “normal” person, a lot of things have metaphors, they see composition in things that others wouldn’t batter an eyelid at and Instagram allows others to see into the world of our creative minds..i think that is a very powerful tool for all creatives, it definitely inspires us to create.

For fun

For me, being creative is a hell of a lot of fun and is on par with video games and high adrenaline sports. Just taking random photos of things you experience and things you see can be great to share with the world.

Inspiration catalogue

As a professional designer I am constantly thinking of how things can be designed, improved or made exciting and sometimes when you walk past somewhere something sparks inside you. Instagram can be a place to store all the things that inspire you and hash tagging each image will also make it easier to find. You may argue Facebook offers the same option but I believe using Instagram for this purpose is a much better app than Facebook for storing inspiration & ideas from general life.

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Don’t be daft

Don’t put images on Instagram that you have spent weeks creating, I don’t believe Instagram was made for that. Unless you are happy for others to lift your hard work and use it as their own or alternatively if you have already received payment for your creation then that is fine, it could even help you build a larger fan base.

Improving design composition

If you set your camera to have grid lines what you can do is really play with composition ( I will discuss this in the near future when I discuss the basics of photography ), this is useful for photography but can also be applied to other areas such as graphic design, web site design & painting. You will notice you really pay attention to how you layout your composition whenever you work and how important it is in creating excellent design.

Increase creativity

It also has the knock on effect of becoming more creative as you are constantly thinking how you might be able to catch the perfect image and seeing everything as a work of art rather than just passing your time through space and time. I highly recommend using it as much as possible to increase your imaginations power.

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Benefits outway the negatives

If you are concerned about copyright and who is using your images then don’t use instagram, if on the other hand you are happy for others to see life through your eyes and you want to improve your creative skills then instagram is probably one of the best apps out there right now. The world is a beautiful place, we should record it, share it and spread the positive things we experience, lets change our perceptions of reality together

Something I am quite fond of seeing in people is when I see compassion, love & a genuine interest in wanting to help others better themselves. On Twitter I stumbled across a tweeter that has created a very nice concept.

Children + instuctions + Cameras + Develop + Print + Exhibit = Gift

Their concept is simple. To stimulate & cultivate creativity in youngsters through the power of photography. Now how is this innovative you may say? How is going to make a difference? There was a famous guy that you may have heard of, Albert Ironstein, that once said “Imagination is more important than knowledge”, which to some degree is very true, you can be extremely good at remembering facts and learning new techniques but unless you can put the facts and knowledge you gain together with the special ingredient of creativity then the experience remains quite useless.

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Sharing our world

For me, creative professions of all shapes and sizes try to make sense of the world through communicating our experiences to others in various forms hoping to improve the lifestyle or mind of the participant who is interacting to what we have created. By giving children cameras it allows them to communicate their view of the world to people and realise that their voice does matter.

Helping others live better without wanting anything in return is the most rewarding thing you can do

When you are a creative and you have been trained to be harness the creative potential of your mind ANYTHING is possible. I was trained for over 10 years to develop creativity. From the ages of 14 to 26 I pursued a greater interest in the arts. Beginning in Graphics, pursuing a dream of architecture when the big bad recession pushed the dream down & then realising that creative skill sets are transferable to just about any profession I retrained myself in the “creative” IT world.

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Why is what I am saying about my life experience relevant to the The Gift of an image scheme? I understand that developing young peoples creativity can vastly improve their lives and help them to dream, realise what they have to share matters & give them the skills to develop their creative genius.

View more about this scheme on Behance & see some of the images that the children have taken

[medium_button color=”dark” url=”http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Gift-of-an-Image/5239267″ target=”_blank”]Read More[/medium_button]

Follow them on Twitter

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Please note, all Pictures belongs to Gift of An Image