What is Creativity and Why is it Important?

According to Google, creativity is the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work. 

Creativity. Something I am all too familiar with. It can be a blessing and it can be a curse! Sometimes it is difficult to be a creative person in this society where creativity isn't always considered important, or at least not as important as academics. People who are highly creative are often considered weird, "out there", not intelligent, or even crazy! But what exactly is creativity? Why is it important? And most importantly, why should our society embrace creativity as a type of valuable intelligence?

In Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talk "Do Schools Kill Creativity?", he claims that we are all born creative but that it is unlearned over time as schools reject our creativity in order to form what they feel is an "intelligent" human being. He claims that the most academically intelligent people, such as professors, don't pay attention to their bodies, but instead think of their bodies as a tool to carry their slightly-left-leaning-brains around in. Makes sense. 

Why would the establishment try to stop creativity? Because they don't view the arts as important. But the arts are what make the world go around. Therefore, this way of thinking about education needs to be overturned. Time for the creatives to fight back and prove that the arts are valuable, exciting, moving and needed.

One type of creative art, photography, can literally spark a revolution! 

We've seen this in history time and time again. Take a look at The Big Picture website to see beautiful collections of powerful photographs in all types of categories. I really enjoyed the one of Scott Kelly's Year In Space. Many of the images don't even look like something you'd think about seeing in space. They look like oil paintings. The vibrant colors, the shapes, the design of our universe is mind-boggling! These images tell a beautiful story. They are art, but they are also science, they are also spirituality, they are also a key to unlocking curiosity and they inspire the pursuit of new things! I loved this website! I've been working on a photography project in my community involving powerful images that describe where I live. Here's some I'm starting with.

These days if someone wants to get into the art of photography, they really need to understand how to promote their work online. Appropriate photo size and resolution is the first step toward achieving this. All photo editor programs have the ability to resize the image and change the resolution. For example, Pixlr you can click on "Image", "image size", and then change the size - also known as dpi (dots per inch).  You want to edit an image size so that it is similar to where you are trying to use it. If it is a website, it doesn't need to be too large. If it is to be printed as a billboard, you will need a lot of pixels!

Then, when you save it, you can lower the quality (resolution) if you didn't want a large image or file. If you lower it too much, it will become blurry. If you make it too large, it will make your website run slow.


Once you have a lot of great images and want to share your craft with the world, what do you do?
One pretty cool way that I just learned about how to do, is right through Youtube! The easiest way to do this, I discovered, is by uploading your photos to Google Photos - or, maybe they are already there if you use your camera phone and have your images automatically backed up. You can go through them and create a specific album just for your photo slideshow. From there you can easily link them into your Youtube Photo Slideshow. Here's one I did just for fun!

This method also enabled me to add music, which was so easy and I found the song I wanted right away by searching for "farm" since that's the theme of my video. It fits perfectly! My video is creative because I used colorful images that fit into a nature theme. Some are landscape, while others are macro (up close). I ordered my images to tell a story of the seasons - starting with winter, going into spring, summer, then a little fall, and ending again in winter. And so, the cycle continues!