Here are 12 ideas to get your creative juices flowing and increase your skills and value as a photographer. TIP 1 - Time Lapse photos. I showed my niece how to do this with clay figures and stitch the resulting frames together into a video file, and she was busy for days. If you control the exposure consistently to keep the images consistent with one another, you can do some really fun stop-motion animation. Or, you can set up your camera to capture other slow motion effects such as flowers opening and seedlings growing. TIP 2 - Night Lights. Things look very different at night. Shooting city scenes with available light creates some interesting images. And shooting outdoor images under moonlight or with "light painting", where you open up the camera shutter for an extended exposure, and "paint" your targets with colored or plain light, can create some truly bizarre images. TIP 3 - Astrophotography. Hook that SLR up to a telescope, and you are ready to peer into the ...