Bad news people. If you take boring-ass photos of flowers and dogs at 12 megapixels, you are going to take boring-ass photos of flowers and dogs at 36 megapixels. Period, end of story.

… A camera won’t save you. It won’t make you a better photographer. In fact, obsessing about it has probably made you a worse photographer. Save yourself some money and go shoot some photos with whatever is in your hands or on your shelf right now. You don’t need any of that bullshit gear right now, and when you do need it, you will know.”

Commercial photography aside, trust is a tough issue. There are billions of photographs online (in reality any person has access only to a very small fraction of them), and the question often becomes how one can have any faith in one’s photographs if there are so many others already out there (you might have noticed: I just called it faith, instead of trust - pick the word that comes closer to what you feel). For me, the answer has always been very simple. It comes in the form of a question: What does it matter if other people take photographs? What do other people’s photographs have to do with your own photographs?

Again, this seems to come down to trust: Only if you don’t have trust in your photographs, if you don’t have the faith that your photography expresses what you want it to express, only then can you be bothered by other people’s photographs. After all, as a photographer there is only one person that can express what you want to express, and that’s you. If you don’t have the faith that you can do that, then you might think that someone else can do it, that someone else can take a photograph that expresses what you want to express.

I can think of all kinds of areas where a person could indeed express another person’s ideas or thinking - but none of those areas have anything to do with art: A medical diagnosis, a scientific theory, a political slogan, … But I yet have to come across two novels by two different authors that express the same idea in the exact same way. I yet have to come across two songs by two different composers that express the same feeling in the exact same way.

Creativity is the basis of self-expression. Why are some people supposedly more creative than others, and why can’t others open themselves up enough to be able to express who they are?

Creation is the birth of something, and something cannot come from nothing. When someone creates something: a painting, a poem, a photograph, the creativity comes from an idea, from a feeling, from emotion, or from a combination of ideas, feelings and emotions that are somehow ‘reborn’ from all our experiences and perspectives.

Creativity is the desire to express ourselves. To formulate these expressions, we have to draw from our reservoir of experience, dreams, desires and experimentation and mix together what was, what is, and what could be… I don’t think you can learn it, it is rather something that evolves. Your perception of everything in your life fills up this reservoir.

Some people are drawn to create and express themselves, others are drawn to reflect, to analyze. But in the end, they all could be creative if they had the desire to explore the way in which they are integrated in the world of their experiences. Because creativity is really a rebirth, a true tone we feel for ourselves and for our world. Then our work becomes a real part of who we are. Maybe all this is a question of how deep we are willing to go…