Creativity

A blank roll of film, or snsor for the digital version, and a blank canvas are the same and yet they are different creative modes requiring different creative skills. Maybe a statement of the obvious, but sometimes artists and art critics dismiss photography and photographers as a creative art form.

A painter creates a painting from images in their mind, which is what artist often describe as original art, but the ideas of the artist comes from somewhere in their mind based on their experience, and often something they see or know.

A photographer starts with a similar blank canvas, being film or sensor, and captures an images they want to create later with the presentation of the image. They too create from their experience, and that's the same creativity as a painter.

The difference is simply in the medium, via canvas and paint, or via film or sensor. In many respects of art, that's the only difference as a painter captures a landscape with paint and a photographer captures with a camera.

Both the painter and photographer have to see the image in their mind and see how they want to the final version to look. The only difference is the painter starts with a blank canvas and the photographer starts with something real, but not always in either case.

A painter can see some thing or scene, such as a still life, a portrait, a landscape, etc. and translate it to canvas, much the same way a photographer sees the same thing or scene and captures it on film or with the digital sensor. The only difference are their tools.

Art critics say painters can create a painting from scratch, whether it's a modern painting or an artistic variation of some thing or scene, which differentiates them from photographers, but with the tools in digitial image editors, a photographer can create an image or a variation of an image on a digital canvas similar to a painting.

And with the digital art applications, an artist can "paint" from something from scratch just like an artist uses paint, or import an image and create a artistic variation of it with all the paint tools in the application. The only difference is one paint is physical, the other digital.

Ok, something long known and written and spoken about. Nothing new. It's just a thought I had and expressed because I was thinking about my photography which with the thought I capture images to portray them realistically, where the person sees in the final image what I saw in my mind standing there.

Not necessarily very creative, just me and my images, because when given a blank canvas I can't see what I want to create. I have to see it in real life and then translate that into what I want to create for the final image.

And why an artist I'll never be, but a photographer I can strive to be.