Creativity makes a difference

Dewitt Jones, award-winning National Geographic photographer, turns a telescopic lens on the creative process.

Making a difference. It's something we'd all like to do. To share with the world a new vision, a new attitude, a new perspective that helps lift us all a little higher.

For many of us, however, access to new visions, attitudes, and perspectives can seem frustratingly difficult. The world changes at an ever-increasing rate, and we seem barely able to keep up with it, much less find new ways to contribute.

"Be more creative," they tell us. But hey, that's not easy. Creativity is a word reserved for artists, and there's a very big difference between art and business. Art is creative; business is practical. Art is frivolous; business is serious. Art is to be indulged in only when all the "important stuff' is done; business is the "important stuff." No wonder the subject of creativity sets off a palpable uneasiness in many of us. "Hey, I've spent my career attending to business, now you want art as well?!"

Yet that is exactly what making a difference calls for. For what is creativity but the art of seeing things in a new way; the art of looking at the ordinary and seeing...the extraordinary.

The essence of creativity is not a technique but an attitude; an attitude of curiosity, openness, and celebration. An attitude that allows one to constantly see the world with new eyes. Though creativity is not a technique, I have, during my years as a photographer with National Geographic, learned a number of methods to help me access that creative state. The more I practiced them, the more I realized that these techniques apply equally well to many situations-whether I am creating a photograph, parenting a child, running an office, or serving a client. Change the challenge, the principles remain the same. Using my photographs as examples, let me share some of these techniques:

Extraordinary solutions

To find an extraordinary photograph, I first need the right lens on my camera. If I don't initially view the challenge from the right perspective, I know I don't have a chance of finding a truly creative solution.

Consider the photograph above of Yosemite Falls. It is shot with a lens that creates quite a pleasant scene. Yet as I stared through the viewfinder, I wasn't happy. I'd seen it before. The perspective offered nothing new, nothing extraordinary. Looking again, I realized that what had really drawn my eye to the falls in the first place was not this view at all. Rather, it was something at the very bottom of the frame; the juxtaposition of the single silhouetted tree and the surging water behind. I had the wrong lens-the wrong perspective-and it was keeping me from capturing the extraordinary view. When I corrected my perspective, then I found the real photograph on the next page.

This metaphor from photography helps me daily. In both the business and personal challenges I'm confronted with, my first question is, "Do I have the right lens on my own eyes? Am I looking at this from the proper perspective?" The metaphor keeps reminding me that without the right perspective, I don't have a chance of finding that extraordinary vision.

Perspective

First I find the right lens; then I have to find the right focus. What are the elements of the solution that deserve the most attention? Within that right perspective, what elements are most critical? In the photograph of Yosemite Falls, everything has to be in focus. Both the tree and the falls must be tack sharp, or you'll never see the magic of the vision. In the case of little ground squirrel on page 61, however, only one element needs to be clear. Only the squirrel is sharp, while the soft background serves as a foil to draw attention to it. Here again, I use this photographic analogy every day-- have I put the elements of the solution into the right focus? For without the right focus, the vision will always be fuzzy.

Probably the most important key to accessing my creativity, however, I found in another lesson from my photography: There's more than one right answer. It's a simple idea, but one that has radically changed the way I look at life.

Throughout our careers, we, too, often fall prey to the belief that there is only one right answer. You either have it or you don't. My own thinking often pulls me in this direction, but I find that if I look closely, it simply doesn't match up with what I see around me. As a photojournalist, I've reported on a thousand different cultures, each finding a thousand different answers to the challenge

National Geographic sent me to Smith River, California, where they raise about 80 percent of the country's Easter lilies. If you look at the three pictures on the next page, in the first I've chosen a perspective that does a pretty good job of telling that story: picked lilies, unpicked lilies, the boy picking them, a little of the region's architecture and weather. It's one right answer. As a photographer, however, I would never think of stopping here. Almost as soon as I snapped the shutter, I reached into my bag for another lens, walked over two rows, knelt down and found...another right answer. The same parameters of the problem now seen from a totally different point of view. My favorite right answer that afternoon was the last photo. They were using a helicopter in the field, I got a ride and, looking down from 200 feet, saw the extraordinary in the ordinary. Three right answers.