Payam Rajabi is an incredibly talented and extraordinarily young Toronto-area photoblogger whose work I've been a fan of since I caught him at the Toronto Photobloggers 2 event at the Yorkdale Apple Store in February. I was even more impressed when I learned that the bulk of his early work was shot on a point and shoot and he's only recently switched to an SLR - browse his archives for some really beautiful work.

Payam presented a quick overview of a project he did as the editor of his high school's yearbook - a really unique and original way to do the "Class of 2006" photo without standing on the school's roof and taking the hackneyed shot. He wanted to wait for the yearbooks to be published before sharing more details and now that they're out, he's published the very impressive results.

Creativity is so important in everything we do and is really one of the few cognitive tasks that we as humans do better than computers. The phrase "thinking outside the box" is far more clichéd than the off-roof-photo, but I think it applies in this case (and, of course, in this case too). We try to apply it in everything that we do and sometimes we have fantastic a-ha! moments and make amazing breakthroughs (sometimes we take photos off roofs too - you can't win 'em all). Getting inspired is most of the journey and Payam gives us a great example of how a successful execution completes the trip. He (and his team) obviously planned very carefully for various contingencies and it comes through in how smoothly the various boxes complete the full page. Congrats on some beautiful work!