Limitation is the mother of creativity

I'm one of those people who always think that I could take better pictures if only I had more (and better) equipment, more interesting subjects and more time. But sometimes I'm reminded that sometimes limitation is the mother of creativity. Sometimes when you are seemingly limited by something, you begin to really test the boundaries of those limitations and are able to produce something you might have never thought to try. There are quite a few exceptionally creative movies, pictures and music that were created under certain limitations (censorship, limited budgets etc).

In fact some people like to work under limits so much that they love lomography or use pinhole cameras etc., so that they can get random stuff that are interesting.

For example Alex Majoli has been able to take award winning photos using point and shoot cameras. Joel Charlebois and others have managed to win competitions using point & shoot cameras.

Ok, I'm not saying that my pictures are exceptionally creative, but the achievements of people who have managed to take exceptional images using so called limited equipment inspire me and I have to start challenging myself to take better (and more creative) images with what I already have. Especially since my budget at the moment doesn't really allow me to buy a lot of photography stuff.

I started digital photography by using my friend's digital camera whenever he brought it around and then I borrowed my then girlfriend's (she's now my wife) camera to play around with. One of the results of my experiments with her camera is shown at the top of this post. At the time, I really got frustrated by the camera's shutter lag, so I started playing around with moving the camera while I took pictures. One of those pictures that I took that day was a picture of my guitar (which I still am trying to learn to play). After the picture was taken, it was post-processed using Picasa. It's not great, I know, but as with a lot of my pictures, I'm using it as a sort of starting point to obtain ideas for future pictures. I have some almost good pictures which could be better but at least with digital, the learning curve is a lot faster.