Sometimes when I'm lacking inspiration, I chase song lyrics... as I love music. ; It's funny how lately I view lyrics in my head as snapshots. ; Does anyone else do that? There's a lot of strong imagery in this one: Tim McGraw - Good Girls - Live In HD I think I'm after these images next.
Interesting thought process, Hula. ; I never really thought to take song lyrics and use them for photo inspiration. ; I think I might have to try this now. ; Thanks for the suggestion, and the song is filled with images. ; Good luck.
Interesting.. ; I've been thinking of asking something similar for some time now. For me it's kind of different though. ; Sometimes I just need the motivation to process. ; I've always found it easier to take pictures then sort through them, find the good ones, and make them as good as I can. ; Sometimes I need to get some motivational music playing in order to fire up photoshop and to do what I need to do. ; Although I had a great trip doing night photography one night while listening to a bunch of sort of night themed music mixes. I guess for me it's not the words, usually, it's the feel of the song. ; I'm... ; I don't know. ; Sometimes I think I've got synaesthesia. ; I don't want to go to into what that is, but it's a thing where your senses get kind of confused. ; There are more exotic forms out there, if anything I've got sound-color. ; Which means sounds can have a sort of visual character to them. ; But it's also possible I've just watched music visualizations for too long and am used to thinking of music in that way. I'm also a hobby author, I write for my own enjoyment. ; This is where it gets really fun. ; I sometimes call music my creative drug. ; Sometimes the best thing to help me write a new bit of text is to get a new interesting song to listen to. ; I can listen to particularly inspiring songs and get a specific storyline out of them. ; I was stuck in one sequence I was working on in my head and I didn't quite know where to go with it. ; But a song I was listening to while I was shovelling the driveway suddenly started to represent that part of the story and then something dramatic happened in the song and I knew what had to happen in the story, I saw it happen in my head. ; One of my stories originated in one particular song that I was listening to, I don't know how it happened but listening to it I saw this particular scene and I started fleshing out characters and seeing what they were doing and I got this whole sci-fi (my favorite genre) storyline out of it. Or in another version, one particular song gave me a very specific series of moving images that I still think would have made a good music video for the song. ; Just the beginning though, once the song really gets started I lose the visual track. It's interesting.. thinking along these lines made me think of a specific song. ; And yes, it DOES give me a specific visual image that I could try to reproduce. ; It's Duran Duran, the song is The Edge of America. [youtube]The Edge Of America[/youtube] I don't expect this will necessarily appeal to a lot of people, it's a little known song of a bygone era. ; But it always did something to me. ; It effected me in weird ways. ; For instance, the line "vigilantes out on dawn patrol" stuck with me. ; When I realized that the wolves at the zoo go out on a sort of morning patrol of their enclosure, I instantly dubbed the behavior "dawn patrol". ; Every time I watch them I think of that song. But now that I listen to it... ; I see something. ; Morning, a grey dawn. ; The song always used to make me think of the West coast, but now that I listen to it I see the midwest. ; I need a scene that captures the feel of a wide open expanse, I need something like a farm field or a prairie. ; Preferably with some sort of decaying structure.. I know some old barns in the area that might do marvelously. Alternately, at the same time it makes me think of the lake shore in Chicago after a rain. ; Curious contrasts, eh? Dang, that's really cool. ; I've used music to inspire me to go shooting, or to motivate me to do some processing, but I've never tried to use it to visualize an image that I want to take before. ; I like it. ; I like it a lot. ; I never would have thought of trying this, even though I did exactly the same thing with writing. Right, I'm going to dig up some of my older CDs that I haven't listened to in ages to see what they do for me. Now suddenly I'm extraordinarily eager for winter to be over with. ; I need at least spring time for the imagery that that song put in my head. ; I need to find something that suits winter for now.
You're welcome, Jeff. ; Glad you like the idea. Dan, you know what your posts always make me feel like? ; Like I went over to my best friend's house, flopped on the couch and said something totally random, and had it turn out to be something way cool. ; Man, but that feels good. ; I love it when you post to my threads. ; I always walk away feeling glad I said whatever random thing I said.
Weird.. I have to say you're the first person to state an appreciation for my rambling tendencies. ; Oh well.. for better or for worse it's how I do these things. ; I do the same things in email. ; I get into these streams of consciousness sort of things and can end up completely losing track of what I started out to say. And incidentally, I swear that youtube link worked when I tried it out in preview. ; Dunno what happened between then and the final posting.
