One of the challenges I face in teaching creativity is getting students to experiment and make attempts to create images that they want to make. Last quarter I have several students demonstrate a strong attraction to mysterious images created in the darkness with an eery atmosphere of fog. We had numerous nights and early winter mornings with plenty of fog and yet my students didn’t to photograph it. I don’t think creativity takes a lot of time to execute. I think it takes a small idea combined with effort that can be a short as just 15 minutes a day.
I decided to make my own experiment one morning recently. I went out to start my car before heading to work and decided to spend five minutes photographing the fog that appeared in the headlights. It seemed like a scene waiting for an actor to show up. Thanks to the new AI tools, I could experiment with adding a human figure into the image. The final image is not as good as it could be if I had actually worked with a actor on set, but this is just an experiment to explore how atmosphere can create an evocative cinematic image.
