As it happens, I’ve been working on a research proposal that is supposed to outline my research program for the next five years. The issue is that the adjudicating panel spans a range of expertise, but none of the panelists is exactly in my area. Hence the need to simplify the description of my work. This may seem like a limitation for the proposal, but it’s actually a great thing. I find it very helpful to have main objectives to be formulated with enough simplicity that I can keep them on top of my mind on a daily basis as I work with graduate students, who do the actual research work. This makes making everyday micro decisions easy: does this move us closer to the objective? When the description of the goal is simple, this loaded question reduces to a yes-or-no one.
The same principle applies to photography. My camera is pretty advanced, and there is a nearly infinite number of combinations or lenses and settings that I could use. However, I find that it is most effective to simplify things. I only have a few combinations of settings: for action (maximum aperture, fast shutter speed, auto ISO, high framing rate, continuous focus), for portraits (same as above, but slower shutter speed, sometimes, manual low ISO), for landscapes (narrow aperture, low ISO, single-shot focus, single frame drive). There are othe creative scenarios beside these, but they are exceptions. So the question of choosing the settings, which can be overwhelming to a beginner photographer, can actually be simplified to “what are you trying to achieve?” And the beauty is that there are only few answers: freeze (or blur) motion, separate the subject from the background (or maximize the depth of field). This classification of shooting scenarios is so simple that it frees me to mostly think about composition, which is always important.
