Introducing the CRAZY CAMERA
Add Focus, Depth & Perspective to Your Writing
The Crazy Camera is a playful tool that I use to stretch my writing in new directions. Photography is rich with inspiration for writers, and the crazy camera takes full advantage of this. The crazy camera can nudge you out of the echo chamber of your own mind, with its well-worn habit ruts and limiting thought patterns. The crazy camera invites unexpected framings, surprising moods, diverse perspectives.
I should clarify, that Crazy Camera is my nickname for this tool. The official (on the birth certificate) name is Curious Camera. And it’s curious in two senses. Firstly, it’s curious in the way that Alice (of Wonderland fame) might use the word: “Curiouser and curiouser!” Alice cried, when she couldn’t figure out all the shrinking and expanding that was happening. This alludes to a world of imagination, where normal rules don't apply. That is the world of the Curious Camera.
The name Curious Camera also reflects the fact that this camera is powered by curiosity, by your curiosity. Or is it the camera that's curious? Does it have a mind of its own, leading you into curiouser and curiouser places? Oh dear, you see why I call it Crazy? This all sounds a bit silly doesn't it, but such silliness can lead to new ways of seeing, to deeper insight and AHAs! That's what we're chasing with this Crazy Curious Camera. Instead of capturing images, it captures imagination. It lets you break free of ordinary thinking, to discover your own flavours of crazy.
The Curious Camera wants to know everything and pushes its nosy lenses into all manner of things, in and out with the zoom, on and off with the filters. What might its viewfinder find? There’s only one rule, really, and that is: Anything Is Possible. Nothing is too crazy to play with.
Let's zoom in now, to unveil the fantastic features of this Crazy Camera. (Cringe. I sound like a cheesy salesperson). Let’s examine some of its capabilities. (A feature list? Booooring!)
I hope not! Read on, and see what you think.
Feature 1: Play with FRAMING & COMPOSITION
Writers, like photographers, make many choices about how to frame and compose a piece.
What subject will you write about?
What will you choose to include or exclude from the frame of your piece, or from a scene?
What elements will you juxtapose?
How will you balance parts of your story?
As a photographer uses leading lines to guide the eye, how might you guide the reader’s attention through your narrative?
We can frame things outside of us, our words acting as a window on the world. We can switch to selfie mode, words acting as a mirror. Or we can point the crazy camera into imagine-land, words doing whatever the heck we want them to.
There are so many choices, but please don’t be overwhelmed. The purpose of the crazy camera is to become intentional about your decisions, and to recognise that even a slight twist can lead to surprising outcomes.
Don’t be paralysed by choice. Be playful with possibility.
Feature 2: Play with LENSES
Imagine for a minute. You’re taking photos with a real camera. You use the macro settings to zoom in on wildflowers, insects, leaves. As you’re happy-snapping, you discover that the magnification can be increased ad infinitum, allowing you to view things at a cellular level and smaller. You see that a cell looks like a bustling city. (And to think they’re called simple cells!) As you explore, it’s like being in an art gallery, a whole new world of patterns and designs.
Now, imagine you’re at the Great Wall of China. You switch to a wide-angled lens to see how much of the wall you can photograph… and you realise it’s limitless. Impossible? Well, not with writing. Writing allows you to explore all sorts of ‘impossible’ things.
The crazy camera is limited only by what you can conceive. Its lenses can help you to hone in on all sorts of things. So, what might you zoom in on? What might you zoom out on? The simple answer is: anything and everything. Zoom in to your internal landscape; to the heart, or mind, of a character. Explore the minutiae of motivation, or describe a small, but crucial detail. Zoom in to create intimacy. Let your reader see every wrinkle, hear every heart whisper, feel the trickle of every tear.
Zoom out to the scope of your life, paint a panorama of your social landscape, or a birds-eye view of your story’s timeline.
Writing about complex topics? Zoom in for detail, zoom out for wider context. Take a wide-angled view of the world you’re writing. Then zoom in to a scene. Zoom in to a character, in to a single quirk. Then back out again… Experiment with scale. Play with distance.
Pop on a telephoto lens and bring distant memories into sharp focus. Remember the incident that altered the course of your life? Hone in, until you feel it again, in vivid detail.
So much lens magic. But there’s more (she says, all salesy again). Pop on a fisheye lens to create a uniquely distorted view. Bend reality with a thought experiment. Challenge assumptions. Show the warped perception of a character, or of an unreliable narrator.
All of this lens switching is achieved through your intention. Choose your lens, and write what comes. Then choose again.
Feature 3: Play with FOCUS
In addition to switching lenses, the crazy camera invites you to experiment with focus. Bring sharp focus to those things you want to highlight, to crucial details that drive your story. Use diffuse, fuzzy focus to create a dreamy, mysterious atmosphere, or to invite reader interpretation and suggest shades of possibility.
Play with depth of field. In photography, a shallow depth of field isolates the subject, blurring the background. In writing, this could mean focusing intensely on one element while minimizing others. A deeper depth of field keeps everything in focus, which is useful for complex scenes with many important elements.
Feature 4: Play with FILTERS
While playing with sharp versus soft focus can impact the mood of a piece, adding filters can take this even further. In the same way that photographic filters affect the tone and mood of an image, we can use filters to profoundly affect the tone and mood of our words.
To a writer, filters are basically mindset shifts. Do you want to create a cozy, intimate mood? Use a warm filter. Think of your words as a warm hug. Or use a cool bluesy filter to evoke a sense of sadness, or detachment. If you want to differentiate characters or situations, use high contrast.
If you want to explore the beauty that shines through difficult moments, then perhaps a rose-tinted filter will do the trick. It might soften harsh edges and help you write painful memories with compassion. Or perhaps your character has a negativity filter, always seeing the worst in things. Play with the possibilities.
In this digital age, filters are often added in the edit phase. Take a look at any photo-editing software (i.e. Photoshop, or Canva) for ideas. You might like to play with more unusual filters, a whimsical filter perhaps. Ask yourself, ‘How can I add whimsy to my piece?’ and write through that filter mindset. Play with dark and light. Write into the dark and see what shows up. What’s in the shadows? Play around with filters until you create word images that speak to you.
Feature 5: Play with PERSPECTIVES
Perspectives are similar to filters. The differences are not clearcut, but if it relates to mood and tone, I tend to call it a filter. If it relates to a unique way of looking at something, or an angle, I call it a perspective.
Now, let’s imagine again. You’re deep in a forest. After playing with all the lenses on your camera, you discover another setting: PERSPECS. You scroll down: greenie, politician, developer. You scan the forest through your viewfinder and notice a high rise hotel to the left, but when you lower the camera there’s nothing but forest. You continue scrolling through perspectives: indigenous, historical, magical... Then there’s an option to manually type in other perspectives. What will you choose?
There are an endless number of perspectives that we can write from: an environmental perspective, versus a social or economic perspective, an infinite perspective, or a sexist perspective. You could write through the eyes of another person, or from the viewpoint of a nature being, or an inanimate object. You could write from future, or past, perspectives. Or anything else you can dream up. Intentional perspective shifting adds depth and nuance to your storytelling, acknowledging the complexity of life.
Something to Contemplate
Your preconceptions about life act as default filters and perspectives that distort the information coming into your awareness. It is interesting to consider whether it is possible to write with clear, 20/20 vision. Is it possible to strip away filters and perspectives altogether? Or is ‘the eye of the beholder’ always biased, as art school teaches? (I suspect so.) Can you bypass your defaults, by intentionally changing filters and perspectives? Does this help you see more clearly, or differently at least?
Perhaps we can learn from Francesco Dimitri:
We won’t even try to set aside the blinkers. Rather, we will learn how to make a thousand of them, all different from one another, so we can look at the world in a thousand different ways, and continuously rejuvenate our world view, like immortal jellyfish. Francesco Dimitri, That Sense of Wonder: How to Capture the Miracles of Everyday Life
Well, that’s the five big features of the Crazy Camera. Once you’ve mastered the basics, there are a few more advanced techniques you might like to play with.
Feature 6: Play with TIME
Inspired by time-lapse photography, you could compress years of history or progress into a few vivid frames. This is a great way to show evolution over time. Or you could experiment with slow motion, stretching out a moment for dramatic effect, or for in-depth analysis. Speed up to cover lots of ground, slow down to savour details.
Feature 7: Play with EXPOSURE & SATURATION
Overexposure. Underexposure. Both can be a problem for writers. What level of exposure are you comfortable with? What is right for the story? Reveal too much, too quickly, and you lose the tension of your story. Reveal too little and you keep things vague.
Perhaps you want to experiment with multiple exposure, through layered narratives, or overlapping storylines, to create a more complex piece.
Finally, writers could do well to heed David Ulrich’s warning to photographers:
Resist the high-impact style. All too often this means hitting the viewer over the head with a hammering image. The resulting photographs are oversaturated, filled with excessive contrast and blatant subject matter—devoid of subtlety and any deeper meaning or presence. David Ulrich, Zen Camera: Creative Awakening with a Daily Practice in Photography
Take Action
Shooting with a crazy camera is not a precise art. Be playful. Be artful. Experiment. Have fun. Grab your crazy camera, adjust your settings, and start snapping some stories! With its array of quirky lenses, filters and perspectives, you're sure to see your subject in a whole new light.
Downloadable Playsheets
Here is a playsheet to help you choose your settings: frame, lenses, perspectives and filters.
And here is a list of ideas for Crazy Camera shots to get you started, along with some playsheets for recording what you write. (Your inner wonderkid will love them.)
Share Your Snapshots
In future posts I will give examples of snapshots created with the help of my crazy camera. If you feel inspired to write using a crazy (curious) camera, then please share your short snapshots, or links to longer snapshots, in the comments. I’d love to read them. Also, it would be great if you could share what lenses, filters and perspectives you have used - unless you would prefer to have us guess. That could be fun too.
Much love,
So creative! Phoebe, I'm saving this post. Thanks for introducing me to Francesco Dimitri, That Sense of Wonder: How to Capture the Miracles of Everyday Life. Up my street! 💫
Thank you, Phoebe, that’s a nice tool I’ve started to work with a year ago and keep exploring it without conceptualizing it but amazed by its magic. Thank you for putting words on it, it gave me food for thought about future uses. Lots of love.