I’ve been letting my three year old use our old digital camera.  And man is it fun to watch him go to town with it.   He runs through the room snapping pictures of everything, and I do mean everything.  My personal favorite is the series of pictures he took just pointing the camera at the floor while running.  The carpet turned out surprisingly in focus and each one has a little bit more or less of just his feet.  True, these are not masterpieces of photography.  They will not end up on display in any gallery and no one would hire him based on them.  But, he had fun doing them.

Too often, we as adults fail to do new things, fail to really loosen up and get freely creative.  We’re conditioned to be worried about the results.  Most adults, if they were to want to photograph their feet while walking, would spend too much time worrying about the details, and would probably not do anything.  We’re too self-conscious about the possibility of it not turning out right to even try and in the process, we don’t come up with very much that is new or truly creative. 

My goal is to try to harness some of my son’s unselfconscious creativity.  Sure, I might end up with some really bad results, but at least I’m going to have fun trying, and you never know I might happen upon something great.

Do you find yourself too self-conscious to truly be creative?  What do you do to try to move beyond it?