Focus

One of the necessary conditions for achieving a flow state (when you are so engrossed in an activity that you lose a sense of time, and the challenges you face seem to be perfectly matched by your skill level at any given moment) is the ability to focus on the task at hand. This is easier said than done, and both the ability of the individual and the nature of the activity play significant roles. Apparently, people who are good at concentrating their attention are able to restrict the input of external information that they are processing. In other words, they can filter out everything that is not relevant to the activity. This enables them to enjoy what they are doing instead of constantly questioning whether they should be doing something else.

As I was reading about this in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” (my favourite recent read), I thought that artists (or authors in any creative field) use the same principle to create a more focused, and therefore more enjoyable, experience for the audience. For example, in photography, we use shallow depth of field to isolate the subject from the background. This way, we do the pre-filtering of the visual input for the viewers, so they have a better visual experience.

Another photography technique that uses the same idea and that I find particularly useful is covering candid environmental portraits to black-and-white. I did it most recently when shooting dance classes at a local studio. In that particular case, while the subjects themselves are photogenic, the background of the dance studio, littered with clothes, shoes and bags of various bright colours, is definitely not. Removing the colour information from the image guides the viewer’s attention to the subject by literally reducing the input bandwidth. I also often use this technique in street photography, where the colours of the background scene are not only impossible to control but also irrelevant to the subject.