Literally, all day long I look around and I see things. Opportunities. Possibilities. Stories.

This is what differentiates photographers and artists from everyone else. We see. Not just what is there, but also what could or should be there, or what might be there in some time yet to come, or something that only exists in an alternate universe.

I get inspired by everything, from the world around me and the people I interact with to TV, the music I listen to, and books themselves. Some of these ideas are easily come by, they are obvious but others are harder to spot, and some only come to me, in conjunction with other things I see.

One time on the way to the shops, I saw a dining chair just standing next to a low garden wall, which became ‘The chair at the end of the world’.

Another time I took a picture of a thorn bush, just to try out a new lens. I love tangled things, so this appealed to me. However, only when I came across some pictures of snow, did I remember this picture again. After playing with it, I ended up with what I called ‘The Heart of Winter’.

A final example, I passed a brick wall that was part of a school. It had a sticker with a little girl’s name on it obviously it had been part of a game or introduction. The whimsy of it stuck there on a yellow brick caught my eye and I wanted to show my original delight in the image I then created, which turned it into ‘Love weighs you down’.

So anything and everything is worth a second look. Sometimes it means combining more than one image to create the original vision, at other times the magic is already there and just needs a little enhancing, a little more colour, more shadows, another shade of red, or a different colour palette all together. Everything is fair game.

© Sybille Sterk