Now you know what I’m photographing this weekend, it’s time to think about what might inspire you.

One source of inspiration is the flickr popular tags page, which shows you what the most popular photo tags were over the past 24 hours, one week, or all time.

Looking at the all time popular tags, you’d expect to see the likes of ‘birthday’, ‘friends’, ’sunset’, ‘clouds’, ‘city’ and so on. When you look at the more recent tags, though, they often don’t make an awful lot of sense. Unless you were at “Northern Voice 2010″, for example, simply seeing a tag for it may not help you.

Of course, you’ll now be expecting me to plug the picWords book, and you’d be right.

As I’ve explained elsewhere, you might think the list of words are just randomly picked, but in fact they are designed to help give you a creative boost, a change in direction, and a break from what you normally shoot.

They’re not necessarily ‘popular’ tags, either. Some of them are, of course, but others are probably words you wouldn’t immediately think of tagging photos with. What they encourage you to do is to find new ways of looking at the world around you, of composing scenes, and taking different (and hopefully better) photos.

It’s like tagging before the photo has even been taken.

Anyway, back to this weekend. In the northern hemisphere, spring has definitely sprung in many places. The days are lighter and longer, and there’s a whole host of natural activity going on — flowers, animals and birds are bursting.

Why not go to your favourite patch of nature, or pick a brand new one, observe it, and then capture it with your camera.

Even in the city, there’s a lot of life going on. Go get it.

Wherever you shoot this weekend, enjoy it.

Tags: flickr, Ideas, inspiration, nature, popular, spring, tags

This entry was posted on Friday, May 14th, 2010 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.