Jo's Photo Mojo Motivator

When AL bemoaned of losing her photo mojo it got me thinking how we get to take these pictures. There's the 'I just have to record that beautiful, surprising, funny thing for posterity/sharing and quite possibly Facebook'. Then there's the photographic mission where you've identified a particular potential 'decisive moment' and sally forth with a grim determination to nail this image. There's the occasion photography, a celebration, an artistic plate of food or a new location to explore where brandishing your camera is obligatory. Some people just grab their cameras, go out and shoot whatever catches their eye, and hopes to catch a good one. And really this is a great habit for those of us practising our craft. I do carry my camera every day, not just my iPhone but a proper, grow up one but I have to admit that stuff gets in the way and I don't take it out of my bag enough. So using the photo mojo finder tool I had developed I thought I'd set myself a challenge - if I chose to accept it!

All I'd done is collected random topics to inspire from the web, my imagination and eliciting often intriguingly obscure images from others and ended up with a database of 350 disparate themes. Because I have an unnatural love of Excel, I put them in a spreadsheet complete with a random picker to at a mere press of [F9] plucks a topic from the 350. I have a slightly less elegant version on my iPad, I can't discover how to force a manual recalculation in Numbers so have modified it slightly. I’ll be sending it off to AL and our little band of happy snappers and we're going to think of ways to set challenges with it. And as the fad seems to be for these 365 projects I thought I'd be less ambitious and go for a week of living by the dice also. If a dice had 350 sides that is. I figured I may need to set some rules so I don't keep randomising until I really like the proffered theme but I should be able to 'roll again' if I've already done that one, or I could add the wrinkle that I can roll again but have to tie it in with the first theme. A week doesn't seen a mammoth task and it will be interesting to try dice with creativity. It certainly won't be as subversive as Luke Rhinhart's cult classic The Dice Man, I can guarantee that, but it is bound to get my photographic juices flowing and who knows it could turn into something bigger. Wish me luck!

And if you're wondering about the funky abstract image, I created it using the iPad Percolator app.