10 Fun and Easy Photography Tricks to Invigorate Your Creativity

Half the fun of photography is the experimentation. Sometimes, with a little ingenuity, you stumble upon a great image or a new technique that can blossom into an entire series or simply provide a bit of fun on a rainy day. Here are 10 such tricks you can easily try out.

Cooperative of Photography put together this cool video. While some of these tricks are useful for professional shots and some are more for fun, they're all worth trying to get yourself thinking outside the box and to expand your creative palette a bit. A while back, I noticed that as I became a more technically proficient photographer, the tendency to experiment with weird things just for the fun of it started to wane, and as a result, my shots became a bit formulaic. Nowadays, I make it a point to try things out, even if they seem a bit absurd when they first cross my mind. Often, the initial idea doesn't necessarily work out, but it leads to the development of some other idea that ends up in my arsenal of techniques. Do you have any fun tricks you use? Share them in the comments!

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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6 Comments

cool stuff

The lens flare part is kind of cliche for me. Locally there are a lot of photographers using prisms, in which all the photos look the same.

I wish I had time to watch all these videos. Some sites will do a synopsis of the video in actual text so people not willing to watch the video can still grab the gist of the content. Just saying...

I strongly disagree with the practice of writing out a video's content. It robs the creator of the views they rightfully deserve for creating the content and is borderline plagiarism at best, in my opinion.

I did think about that. I think maybe the videos I'm thinking of are original content on those sites and thus that dilemma does not exist in the same sense.

don't do videos much - like text with photos
especially when it involves a new technique on Photoshop (which this one does not)
thanks anyway