Where does inspiration come from?
If that was an easy question none of us would struggle with inspiration from time to time. I don’t think I’m alone when I get into a block and nothing seems to be coming my way.
But then, out of blue, inspiration can hit.
I recently created an image I never thought I’d create. I’m in Wyoming, teaching at Eatons’ Ranch, like I do every September, when the husband of one of the participants starts taking product shots of the whiskey and gin bottles from his distillery (Mammoth Distilling).
I love my portrait lens but haven’t used it much in the last few years. It’s an 85 prime and doesn’t work so well for horses running. But I carry it with me, just in case. So, I put it on my camera and joined the creative fun of taking product shots all over the ranch. It was a blast.
We had a whiskey tasting one of the nights, on the long deck overlooking the ranch and Chocolate Drop. We played with images of the bottles, images with shot glasses, and images with the cowboys. We took the bottles on a ride and took closeups in the natural environment. We placed the bottles in old-world settings.
I really loved the creativity of making those images. My mind came up with a gazillion ways to display the bottles.
It was so much fun that I then used the one of the bottle images to create a 24 x 24 photo encaustic painting.
It was really fun to do, and maybe I’ve embarked on a new endeavor of creating product shots in photo encaustic, but more importantly, I cracked through a creative slump. And really all it took was putting a different lens on my camera and following a whim of taking some photographs of liquor bottles. But more importantly, it got my mind thinking a little differently. It started the creative juices flowing.
Sometimes I find that I’m looking so hard for inspiration, but I guess, like everything else, I need to just be open to receiving inspiration wherever and in whatever form it comes.
If interested, here are a few of the raw images from the shoot around the ranch.
With all good wishes,
