Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Inspiration


This weekend I said goodbye to a friend moving back to the UK. She lives near downtown Chicago, so we met up down there to hang out for one last time. We ate at our traditional place, Quartino's. If you haven't been, I highly recommend it.  Eat outside, though, you won't hear yourself think if you try to eat inside.

After dinner we decided to check out the Transformers 3 filming location.  I have never been to a "set" before, so it was kind of cool to see it.  We saw what appeared to be "bad" transformers (race cars with machine guns on them), really cool cars, and Tyrese, who plays Sergeant Epps in the movie. 

After a couple minutes of getting our movie set thrills we headed into the nearby mall to check out the Lego store.  In this mall there is a photography gallery filled with pictures of Chicago, among other things, taken by Cesar Russ.  This brings me to the whole point of this blog post, inspiration.  I have been in a photographic rut lately.  This usually happens in the winter because it is so freakin' cold here that I don't feel like doing anything.  The rut continues until I find my inspiration.  This time it came from Cesar Russ.

After seeing his gallery, and his photography of Chicago, I thought to myself, "I can take these pictures", "I can do this." While searching through some old photos on my laptop today I came across this picture I took of Chicago in July of 2008, 2 years ago. This picture has just been sitting on my hard drive. I took the picture, uploaded it to my computer, and then never looked at it again.  I decided it was about time this photo made its debut.

Since that day I have taken more pictures than I have all month.  I really needed that inspiration.
What inspires you? How do you get out of your ruts?

2 comments:

J said...

Getting out of my ruts have always been different for me.

When I was still at school (before this summer started and all), I got out of one of my longest ruts ever after a storm came to campus. The sky was gloomy and it was breezy outside: the weather felt perfect and there is something about days like that I absolutely adore.

I ran inside, got my camera and never looked back.

I'm currently facing another rut, and I'm not sure what will pull me out of it. It's affecting my writing, too.
I think I need to be back at school now--change of scenery.

Anonymous said...

Um, my friend Kim coming to Houston to teach me how to use my camera would probably get me out of my rut.