“Genius in someone else’s work will not be recognized as genius in your own.”

In art this has always been common, a great picture is painted, and a thousand copy-cats spring up all over the place, because everybody wants to become like the master painter. What ends up happening is they do just that, they copy it, it might even look just like the original because the same technique and material was used, but it’s just another copy.

Fast forward to the age of digital photography: a photographer takes an incredible photo in which the lighting is unique, or a new pose in portrait photography is discovered, or someone finds a way to bring a motion or emotion to life. It’s creative, it’s talented, and sometimes it’s even genius, and the same copying happens again because everyone tries to turn out the same look, the same feel, and use the same technique.

It does work, you can turn out a great picture, but it will be missing one thing: the original.

Know why? It’s because photographs are a little like finger prints, everybody has their own unique touch. Everybody has fingers, but everybody has a different fingerprint. Everybody has a camera, but all photographers  have their own unique stamp. Crazy, huh?

The trick to creating an original is to learn from everybody you can, find out their technique, have fun doing group shooting with other photographers and surfing their blogs and portfolios, but then go out stamp your own fingerprint on photography. It takes time, it takes hard work and it takes courage to find out what you can do. Go out on a limb, hang upside down and take the picture that nobody else did.

You do it, paint the original.