Onegav

What is inspiration?

I believe in intuition and inspiration. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.

Albert Einstein, 1931

I don’t really know the answer, and I don’t really know how it works, but I’m with Albert in my thinking; its intuition, its imagination, and you can only really tap into it if you genuinely let go.

This 365 challenge is exacly that, a challenge, its designed to push limits and understanding, to further technical ability and, perhaps its most improtant facet is to train an eye to see deeper. A challenge needs pressure, and that comes from you (thank you, by the way), in the form of public display and an openness to criticism.

Take a picture every day and post it online for all to see.

A very simple premise, with no real rules other than those you impsoe on yourself. In my case, I take the photograph within every 24hrs, wherever I am, whatever I’m doing, and I post it here, along with my other social media places, like Instagram.

So how does that simple task inspire me? How does that link with imagination and intuition? How am I inspired to take these photographs??

Way back in this challenge, things were very different. I was the giddy child playing on a beach for the first time, amazed by the warm sand and the salty sea. There wasn’t the pressure there is now, I was young and care free.

Half way through, as a teenager my understanding deepened, I began to change, and wondered what might lie beneath the waves; what creatures lived there? What would I see later on if I looked in the right places?

Now, entering adulthood in this journey, I know whats beneath the waves, because I’ve seen it. Now I begin to imagine whats beyond, whats on the other side of the ocean? Is there someone else on the other side of the world stood on a beach looking out to sea, looking back in my direction but unseen due to the unimaginable distance, thinking the exact same thing as me? I wonder…….

To trully be inspired, we need to imagine beyond what we know, we need to free ourselves from the confines of our current knowledge. We need to be bold and dare to wonder, what if, why, how and if?

So what the heck has all this got to do with the light in our conservatory?!

You see, I was inspired to go and take a photograph of it today, but until I stopped and thought about it, I wasn’t sure why that inspiration came to me. The technical aspect of the image came naturally; unsurprising after taking thousands of photographs in just 297 days. But why the light as a subject?

I am always trying my very best to push myself in this challenge, and the pressures of modern life help that, because they make it difficult. Timing isn’t always good, it’s dark, the location is wrong, the light isn’t good, I haven’t got time. And so on, and so on. The pressure of opening myself upto criticism helps to, becasue there is always that fear of failure.

Fear, difficulty, challenge, they all force you to let go, jump into the ocean and start swimming, and that’s when inspiration hits you!

For the record, and to hopefully bring some closure to this difficult subject to articulate, I took these photographs with the fan on the light switched on, because I wondered what different images and effects I could capture with the warm glow of the lights, and the moving fan blades incorporated into the photograph.

I dared to photograph a boring light fitting, just because I asked myself “what if?”, and was prepared to suffer the consequences of failure.

Learnings – let go more, failure fades but your imagination shouldn’t.