Nothing like a little creative shakeup.
I spend way too much time alone and knew I needed to shake things up.
For over a year, I’d been getting emails from the CreativeMornings group but hadn’t attended any events. That finally changed when I decided to go, and while exploring their offerings, one club in particular caught my eye: “Speed Creating.”
I went in with no intention of shooting anything. I just wanted to meet new people and be around fellow creative folks. I didn’t even bring my professional camera—just my phone.
After a round of introductions, we were asked to pair up in teams of two or three and create something.
Okay, so we really did need to create…uh oh.
Fortunately, Nathalie, a creative writer, approached me.
She shared that she enjoys writing stories from the POV of the main subject in images and even shared one of her imaginative pieces to me. Intrigued, I offered to take some photos of her to inspire a new story, and she agreed.
It felt strange capturing candid lifestyle portraits with a phone, but as I always say, “it’s never the tech, it’s always the operator!”
Now, I had to prove it.
After 20 minutes, the sun set and I lost my main light source, so we went back inside. She immediately began flipping through the photos, brainstorming a story structure in record time.
She sketched out the flow in her notebook, and I was blown away by what she created.
Since she had created her first story so quickly, I decided to give her more photo ammunition to play with.
I wandered around the room, capturing a stack of chairs and a roll of empty name badges - just to try something different.
Nathalie took those simple images and spun them into intricate, funny, and relatable stories from the perspectives of each of those objects.
It was such a cool experience—cathartic, even—and reminded me what it feels like to create simply for the sake of being an artist.
Moments like these are rare for me, but this experience with the group and teaming up with Nathalie showed me that I need to do more of this to stay grounded, connected…
And feel like a human being 🙂
What do you do when you start to feel isolated and alone?