Inspi­ra­tion or Ripoff?

I see quite a lot of folks tak­ing about inspi­ra­tion these days. I fig­ured that was a good topic to ripoff, even though it’s a topic that annoys me any­time some­one pro­motes it. That’s because I want my inspi­ra­tion to be a sur­prise. I never, ever want some­one to tell me they’re going to inspire me, or show me some­thing inspi­ra­tional. It just seems rather pre­sump­tu­ous. What hap­pens if they show me their pride and joy and I just don’t care about it? Am I sup­posed to act inspired? Is this really just a way of trolling for a compliment?

There are actu­ally a lot of things that inspire me in pho­tog­ra­phy. Some­times it’s a set design, a post pro­cess­ing tech­nique, an unusual angle, or just a great appli­ca­tion of light­ing. Peo­ple do some wild and crazy stuff in their pho­tographs. When I find an image that really hits me the right way, I want to make an image like it. Then again, some­times I just like an image for what it is and have absolutely no desire to add it to my own repertoire.

Pho­tog­ra­phers aren’t the only ones who do this sort of thing. John Mayer got a lot of com­ments on his song “Heart­break War­fare” because a gui­tar lick sounded very sim­i­lar to “Bad” from U2. His response was some­thing along the lines of, “I know. That was inten­tional.” He didn’t copy the lick note for note, but he appar­ently liked the style and decided to use it on one of his songs. Is that inspi­ra­tion or a ripoff?

Despite my mis­giv­ings about any­thing with the word “Inspi­ra­tion” in the title, I went to one of Lind­say Adler’s classes about find­ing your inspi­ra­tion dur­ing Pho­to­shop World. She men­tioned a prac­tice that she does, I do, and many oth­ers do. That’s to find pho­tos you like and keep them in a folder or on a Pin­ter­est board. There’s an album on my iPad called “Pos­ing.” It’s full of pho­tos where I like the model’s pose, even if I don’t like any­thing else about the pho­to­graph. Appar­ently I like stuff that’s hard to do, because many mod­els who shoot with me balk when I show them what I have in mind. “I can’t twist my back like that.” I may need to start work­ing with gym­nasts instead of models.

I never once thought of that as a ripoff. I’d have a dif­fer­ent sub­ject, dif­fer­ent loca­tion, dif­fer­ent wardrobe, dif­fer­ent light­ing and maybe even a dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion. The part that would be the same, or per­haps just sim­i­lar, would be the pose.

How many times have you viewed a pho­to­graph and said, “Wow! I want to do that?” That’s what I said the first time I saw Trey Ratcliff’s HDR. It’s also what I said when I first saw Joel Grimes’ com­pos­ites. Like many oth­ers, I’ve learned from Trey and then put my own spin on my HDR pho­tos. Though I haven’t done many com­pos­ites, I sus­pect that mine will look dif­fer­ent than Joel’s. Each of those folks — and many oth­ers — pro­vided the seed of an idea, but it’s up to me to put my own stamp on it.

We all stand on the shoul­ders of giants. Don’t be afraid to find inspi­ra­tion in the work of oth­ers and use it. That’s how you’re going to inspire the next generation.