Simple Beauty Simple Play

This week my small photography challenge group word was Fruit.

Simple beauty simple play

As I pondered what I might create around this theme I envisioned a beautiful still life like the ones the old masters painted. I thought about playing with chiaroscuro lighting with simple elegant fruits like pears. My intention was to look for some interesting or pretty fruits to photograph when I bought the weekly groceries. But I forgot. And I lacked the ambition to go out shopping or to try to construct a beautiful still life from the fruit I had available.

So I procrastinated.

Then one morning I simply decided that I wanted to make photographs, I didn’t care whether they were good ones or even something I would want to share with others. I wanted to play with my camera.

Since it was a cold snowy day, doing something in the house appealed to me. “Aha,” I thought, “I’ll make a fruit photograph for our photo challenge.” I scanned the refrigerator to see what was in my fruit drawer—Granny Smith apples, a misshaped grapefruit, an orange and an old looking lemon. None of them excited me. I imagined a big heaping bowl of fresh strawberries, blackberries, or blueberries, but alas, I had only frozen berries on hand.

Finally I noticed a lonely half-lime on a shelf in the refrigerator, left-over from a recipe I had made earlier in the week. For some reason the lime spoke to me (pick me! pick me!). The half-lime was not the most photogenic subject I’ve ever chosen so I decided to slice it as thinly as I could. I had a half-formed notion of photographing a bright light shone through the slices. When it came time to assemble a set where I might try this I couldn’t think of any way to create a setup with lime slices having a light shining through from the back.

Then I remembered a simple square white plate that I rarely used and decided to place the lime slices on it. One thing led to another and another and finally a tall glass of water with the lime slices in it. It was a little like jazz, trying things, responding, and improvising as I went along.

Simple Beauty Simple Play Overcome Procrastination

One of the biggest hurdles to creating for me is procrastination. Big ideas can have a way of stopping me in my tracks. Some of the thoughts that stopped me this week included these thoughts:

• I’d like to create a still life photograph but I can’t think of what to use in the still life and how to arrange it so that it’s interesting and beautiful.
• Even if I make a still life it won’t be as beautiful as the ones I see posted by still life photographers on Instagram
• I can’t think of what to do that will interesting and different
• I don’t want to do something I’ve done before

This is the voice of the ego, judging the end product, wanting to look good. It is not the voice of the creative spirit that simply wants to play.

“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.”

― Anne Lamott

I almost always learn more when I approach my creative work with a sense of curiosity and play rather than with a specific end goal in mind.

Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise.

— George Gershwin