When I taught, loosening up a student was taking away their controls that they were so comfortable with. One assignment I recall was shooting from the hip. They weren’t allowed to look through the view finder. They had to point and shoot, preferably from an unusual angle. There was this element of surprise. In film it could be quite wasteful to shoot 36 frames and they all suck. But in digital to fire off 100 frames is no big deal. In grad school I was always told to loosen up, take a risk. I never learned what it meant to take a risk creatively. It’s not like I don’t try new things and have plenty of failures to litter my creative path. I get loosening up, but I have never really figured out risk. Other than to present your work to a museum curator only to have them brush you off and tell you your work is boring. Be there, done that.
