Starting out in photography – Closing the creative gap

[To learn more about the 'Starting out in photography' posts, please read this post]

Lesson number 2 – Close the creative gap

When you see an image and you think to yourself ‘I wish I knew how to produce an image like that’, you have a large creative gap.

In my mind, you should always be closing the creative gap.

This means that the image that you visualise in your mind, you can actually go out and create. If you can’t, then you have a large creative gap. If you can – and this is where you want to be – then you have a small creative gap.

I learnt the lesson about my creative gap the hard way back in 2005.

While I was happily living and breathing photography 6-days a week at the college I went to in Christchurch, I came across a call for submissions for the newly launched ‘Outdoor Collection’ with Aurora Photos. Aurora was looking for stylish and unique outdoor imagery for its’ newly launched Outdoor Collection. I reviewed some of the imagery on the site; reviewed some of the imagery I had been producing and convinced I would get in on the ground floor, sent off a submission.

A number of weeks passed. Then one day an email popped into my inbox from no other, than Jose Azel, one of the founders of Aurora Photos.

The email was a page long and it was a rejection email (more about rejection in my next ‘Starting out in photography’ post).

What made it different though, was the fact that Jose had taken the time to actually give me some pointers as to why my submission had been rejected. One line in particular has always stuck with me:

“Our jobs as photographers is to show the world to people in a different way”.

While I didn’t realise it at the time – I was pretty bummed about not being accepted – I would go on to learn just how valuable a piece of advice that was. To this day, I still remind myself of this sentence when I am out shooting.

The underlying problem of course, was that my creative gap between what I saw in the Outdoor Collection and what I was producing was a world apart. Yet I couldn’t see it.

One of the reasons I couldn’t see it, is because as a photographer starting out, I was not very objective about my work. And like most photographers, I was a terrible editor of my work (that has since changed, but editing your own work is still a talent in itself).

While this is a lesson about closing the creative gap, it is also a lesson about learning to be objective about your work.

If you are starting out and you are putting together a submission for an agency or even your own portfolio, seek some feedback from your peers.

They will be able to look at your work and give you good, honest and (hopefully), objective feedback.

[Three years later I signed with Aurora Photos to represent my work in their stock collection. If this isn't proof that you can close the creative gap, then I don't know what is].

—