Creativity comes at unexpected times for me. I can’t count how many times I’ve sat in front of my computer trying to come up with some new and exciting way to write an essay or make a video for class. I always want to make something that is going to make my teacher or viewer just go “wow that was so creative”, but not everything is going to affect your audience in that way. You can’t force yourself to be creative. It’s like that quote about love I kinda think “Love is like a fart, if you try to force it, it’s probably crap.” I feel the same way about creativity. You can’t just sit down and stare at a wall to come up with a good idea, you have to go out and experience something that makes you want to create something that inspires you. Creativity doesn’t mean that you did something no one else is capable of. It means you did something in a way unique to yourself. You showed your thoughts and the complexity of what goes on inside your head. 

Creativity is unique to the individual. This reminded me of the other day when my friends and I saw this cute photoshoot online where these girls dressed up like they were on The Bachelor and they took Valentine’s Day themed photos. We really wanted to do something like that with our friends. Before starting, I thought to myself how did they do this exactly? What color backdrop did they use? What did they wear? How did they do their make up? But I realized, that’s not me being creative, that’s me copying what those girls did. I decided to do my own version of a Valentine’s Day shoot. I took a plain white sheet and hung it on the wall in our extra bedroom and covered it with foam hearts that I got from the dollar store, I set up my lights and my camera, and I went absolutely crazy. I think I took about 850 pictures that day. I took pictures of 3 of my friends and even the dog. I think looking back on the pictures, just because someone else did something similar, didn’t mean my photoshoot wasn’t creative. It was creative in its own way. The initial thought might have been the same but the results were very individual. We took the same idea and we made it something completely different. This made me think about photography and really any creativity in general. Everybody is creative in different ways, if you sent two people out to take a picture of the same thing they would most likely come back with very different shots. I think of creativity as not being afraid to be yourself in everything you create. You should make everything uniquely you and what you believe and what you want to show the world that you’re capable of. It’s hard to force creativity, but it is present in even the smallest things that you do. Creativity doesn’t mean it’s perfect or flawless. Some of the most beautiful and creative things are broken.