What are your biggest inspirations/motivation boosts?

Here's another really important source of inspiration for me: Family/Friendships/Relationships

Part of that is direct inspiration, by the closest people around me, whom I love dearly, part of it is also the concept of family, relationship and friendship, which I tend to think significantly more about as I get older... I'm pretty sure that turning these thoughts and considerations into images (or songs) from time to time was a significant help in reminding myself to be thankful for things and not take them for granted.

Like father, like son. by simple.joy, on Flickr

Family portrait? Sure! by simple.joy, on Flickr

I promise to keep you safe... by simple.joy, on Flickr

Compatibility? Of course! by simple.joy, on Flickr

Handsforth my life is secondary by simple.joy, on Flickr

When are you coming home to me? by simple.joy, on Flickr

I'm from a proud family of mischief makers... by simple.joy, on Flickr

Family matters by simple.joy, on Flickr

Showing the world to my child... by simple.joy, on Flickr

Sending signals of love by simple.joy, on Flickr

Creative together by simple.joy, on Flickr

I don't think I'll ever stop being amazed and awed by your creativity with titles, as well as photographs!

We need several simplejoy to make dprevived more interesting! 😀

Thank you - that's very kind!

Oh no... Thanks a lot, but I'm sure more than one would get annoying pretty quickly... 😱

Always remember, it's mostly trial and error with my experiments and in many cases nothing more than mere illusions: 😅

Daily bread... a mere illusion! by simple.joy, on Flickr

If I had to copy someone else's work to motivate my photography, I'd take up basket weaving or origami.

That's an interesting opinion... can you elaborate? I don't think we've had a lot of mentions of copying/replicating someone else's work as a means of motivation/inspiration... but perhaps you were referring to one specific post (the system currently doesn't show which one was replied to, if it's not quotet)?

I'm merely saying that whatever other folks do has no effect upon my own enjoyment of photography.

Thanks for the explanation - glad to hear it‘s like that for you. You‘re not the first to mention that in the thread - of course, not everyone needs inspiration or motivation from outside. May I ask what your main interests/genres for photography are?

Remembering family holidays
One of the motivations for me to take photos, is capturing memories.
Thinking back to our trip to North Norway it seems almost like a "recent" event, but Incredibly it's already 13 years ago!

One of reasons a trip like that can stay fresh in my mind, is that the photos are still around and "available" to see. Different formats for different trips.
I'll make prints, and hang them up, put some on display in public places, add images to my website, I'll make photobooks and occasionally even make a slide show like in this 2 minute video

www.fireplace-photography.com/p488418396/h68bda48b#h68bda48b
best to click on the full screen button when it opens

The kids have grown up and left home since this was made.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and great images, both in the video, as well as on your site in general! Have never been to Norway unfortunately, but it looks wonderful.

It's great that you have such an effective way of keeping precious memories alive. I have to admit that I'm not very good at that, but perhaps I'll find my own way of doing that more when my kids grow older.

Just out of curiosity: Have any of your kids picked up a camera as well at some point?

Thanks Simplejoy :-)
My daughter is quite artistic, likes to draw and paint. She also takes pretty good photos with her phone. But the idea of lugging a big camera around never caught on.

Sorry, I missed this earlier. Primarily nature scenics, close-up and macro, but some street, cityscapes and harbor scenes thrown in, whatever catches my fancy.

Thank you! Great to hear you're into close-up and macro shooting as well. If you have some particular interests there or a couple of shots to give some examples of what you like to shoot, please feel invited to share them here! 👍

Apart from the usual things (recording family, friends, places, etc.), one thing I like doing is converting some of my photos into colour-only versions (i.e. removing all the grey-scale information to leave only the colours). The results are often very weird, but some of them I quite like as somewhat impressionist images.

For anyone interested in the technicalities, producing a colour-only image can be done in HSV colour by setting V=1. In HSV colour, H is Hue, S is Saturation, V is Value defined as V = max (R, G, B). I use GIMP which it supports HSV colour.

Thank you - that's very interesting and I like the results. These two stand out the most for me, they remind me of illustrations from some artistic childrens books and provide a really different atmosphere from a regular shot. Will certainly have to try this - thanks a lot for the tip!

I‘ve downloaded GIMP and tried it, like you described it on dpreview (with an additional HSV layer on top) but unfortunately it doesn‘t really seem to work… must have done something wrong along the way. Could you perhaps describe what you do to the top layer after the conversion? That would be great.

Create a new layer above the image layer with the layer filled with white and set to Mode "HSV Value":

That's it! You should see the result immediately, but you can flatten the image back to one layer if you wish to do further processing.

Alternatively, you can create a duplicate layer which you set to mode "HSV Value" and then proceed to use Curves tool or other suitable tool to lighten the top layer. That will lighten the visible image without changing hue or saturation.
To get a "colour only" image, you need to lighten the new layer to pure white everywhere.

I hope that helps. Please let me know if you would like further info.

I tried, but did not find your technique before you posted this.

But I got the same result using G'MIC-QT for GIMP addon in filters.
G'MIC-QT > Color > Channels to layers - Clorspace: HSV, Output mode: New image

In the resulting image the bottom layer is same as your "colour only" image and the upper layer
in HSV Value mode is a grayscale value image. You can edit the upper layer or throw it away.