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December 18, 2015December 18, 2015

Work in progress

Richard Feynman explained that for some types of work, e.g. doing theoretical physics derivations, he needed large chunks of uninterrupted time. I personally think that any research work ultimately benefits from this kind of distraction-free workflow.

The reality for myself and, I venture a guess, for most of my colleagues (ok, for most people), is far from ideal, though. I do my academic writing in what Robert Boice calls brief, regular sessions (BRSs), and strive to keep them as regular as possible, without being concerned that they are more beef than I would like.

Likewise, I draw and paint on my iPad is sessions so short, that they cannot really be called sessions. Still, this ability to steal a minute or two here and there to do a sketch based on a photo that I took in Venice six years ago is precious to me. Sketching on a tablet is not perfect. It would have been nice to fire up Photoshop and draw with a Wacom graphics tablet, but the reality is that other obligations (many of them self-imposed or even imaginary, but this is beside the point) are so numerous, that long, concentrated painting sessions simply don’t happen, or at least don’t happen often enough

Working in microscopic, fragmented slices of time is a compromise, but it is better than not working at all. In fact, this fragmented workflow even has it’s unique advantages, but the main benefit is that it enables consistency, which is crucial for skill development, or improvement in general.

December 13, 2015December 13, 2015

Words and images: a picture that is worth a thousand words

My daughter likes listening to stories, but sometimes, she prefers just to look at pictures in books. This made me think about which form of content is more valuable for people: verbal or visual. Obviously, neither form can completely substitute the other one, but each has unique features.

Written stories (books) are best at stimulating imagination. Reading a book implies a collaborating between the author and the reader: it is impossible to provide all details of the story in words, so the reader has to use his/her imagination or project prior experience to fill in the gaps. So the impression of the given book is necessarily different for everyone, who reads it.

I think what makes visual images (paintings, photos, etc.) unique is that they have direct access to the viewer’s emotions. Generally, text is not enough to generate sensory perception of the scene. That is why war documentaries are important for indicting compassion towards the people involved in the wars, for example.

So, illustrated stories, which is a common format of children’s books is a perfect format for engaging the audience. This is a strong argument for taking time to write extended captions for photos that we post on social media (Flickr, Instagram, etc.) Alternatively, a good photoblog can be a series of photos accompanied by stories, rather than a simple gallery of images (social networks like 500px or Instagram can fill that nice more effectively).

December 12, 2015December 12, 2015

The other side of fear

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
— Mark Twain

Fear is a fundamental underlying factor that prevents us from taking action, particularly from doing new things. This has been recognized centuries ago in various religious teachings and also has been played out in stories and movies. Yoda’s teaching Luke Skywalker in “The Empire Strikes Back” is a good example, and so is Neo’s skyscraper jump in “The Matrix“.

For me personally, the situations where I notice the effects of fear are not as dramattic as they might be for others. My everyday life is quite cushioned from external threats that shaped our (human’s) fear-based responses by evolution. I think this is also the case for majority of people I know.

But fear is there nevertheless. It surfaces as hesitation or inability to “invent” new techniques when I practice kendo, reluctance to try new lighting setups, camera angles and processing techniques in photography. Most often, this resistance to taking action leads to procrastination. In fact, it is procrastination, as Steven Pressfield eloquently explained in “The War of Art“.

The good news, albeit a difficult one to internalize and to act upon, is that most often, the fear is absolutely unfounded. Jamie Foxx said in a recent interview that he asks his children: “What’s on the other side of fear?” The answer, of course, is “Nothing”. Fundamentally, there is nothing to fear. Naturally, this a very profound concept, if taken in its all-encompassing generality, but the everyday applications are indeed very simple and easy to realize, even for a child. What is the worst that could happen if you speak in a loud voice instead of whispering? If you laugh out loud, holding your stomach and rolling on the floor, instead of smiling shyly? Not much, really. The stakes of taking action and being ourselves, doing what we want, are not as high as we would like to think.

In fact, there is a risk associated with not taking action (the lost opportunity risk), and because of our propensity to inaction, we are more likely to suffer from it than from the risks associated with action. During basketball photo shoot, for example, if I switch from my tried-and-true shutter speed of 1/800 sec, which freezes action every time, and try a slow 1/250 sec speed, the worst thing that could happen is that some (alright, a majority) of the shots would be blurry. On the other hand, the slow shutter speed sometimes results in striking images where the hands and the feet of the athlete are blurred, conveying the sense of motion, while the face is sharp (which conveys the sense of focus and intensity). A few missed mediocre shots are certainly worth capturing a single extraordinary image, particularly if I already have lots of action shots in my portfolio. In this case, the stakes of stepping outside of comfort zone are definitely not high.

Because inaction, maintaining the status quo, is so comfortable, simply recognizing that there is nothing on the other side of fear, that the fear has no substance is not trivial and is in itself an excessive in present-state awareness.

December 6, 2015December 7, 2015

Stepping outside of the comfort zone

It is a common knowledge that growth in any aspect of our lives requires stepping outside of our comfort zone. Also obvious is the fact that it is easier said than done.

The comfort zone, by definition, is the realm of something that we are accustomed to doing. Perhaps, we have even acquired a certain degree of expertise in that area. When I started doing photography seriously, I became used to shooting land- and cityscapes without any people in them. It made sense from the stock photography perspective, and it was not stressful, because taking this king of pictures required no interactions with other people. To take my photography to a higher level required abandoning this comfort zone and becoming comfortable with working with models.

Pushing oneself out of the personal comfort zone is also central in martial arts. I practise kendo, the Way of the Sword, which originated in Japan and still closely connected to Japanese culture, although international influence on it has been increasing. Daily practise, keiko, is the foundation of kendo, but periodic exposure to the stress of completion or dan grading is also crucial for growth. I have to remind myself about this after my recent failed attempt at the yondan (4th dan) grading. Throughout the entire grading day, I kept questioning the wisdom of voluntarily subjecting myself to the stress that comes from the position of being evaluated, the situation that is designed to bring the kendoka outside of their comfort zones. The goal, of course is to be able to control the excitement and to be able to perform under pressure as if it was regular daily practice. As Miayamoto Musashi wrote in his famous “Book of Five Rings”, “In all forms of strategy, it is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to make your everyday stance your combat stance.”

As I said, easier said than done.

December 3, 2015

Why hacks don’t cut it

“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it.”
— Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“

The concept of “hacking” or finding an unconventional, often more efficient, way of achieving something has become very popular. Indeed, some people even build their careers around it. For example, Tim Ferriss has become famous for his books “The 4-Hour Workweek“, “The 4 Hour Body” and “The 4-Hour Chef“. As the titles imply, the underlying idea in all of them is to maximize the outcome of minimal efforts. I am a fan of Tim’s approach partly because I like the ideas of innovation and optimization that are inherent in hacking, but also because his view of hacking is deeper than simple cutting of corners on the way to a goal.

The concept of 10,000 hours that are needed to master a craft, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers“, has recently been debunked, or at least put into a wider context by several authors. Also, the Pareto’s 80/20 rule of diminishing returns when practicing a skill suggests that a lifetime dedicated to any single task would be an example of inefficiency. However, in my personal experience, whenever I see an example of something remarkable being created, it is inevitably a result of a lot of work. When everything is said and done, even if we follow all the quick recipes for success (“10 steps to taking a perfect photo” or “10 steps to writing a perfect blog post”, etc.), the very act of cutting corners removes something valuable both from the process and from the resulting product. We really do need to live the craft that we practice, make it our way, like the “do” in kendo, kado, shodo, etc.

In photography, for example, there is no way to fake the genuine knowledge of the subject, the intuition that comes from true mastery of the technique, the emotional connection with the models, etc. In the event and reportage photography in particular, one needs to become a participant, rather than the observer, in order to convey the emotional content to the viewers. Recently, I was photographing local dance students participating in a Santa Claus parade, an event that is difficult to capture because of the poor lighting conditions (it takes place at night) and general setting (the spectators are separated from the participants, who quickly pass by them on the street). I wanted to take pictures that would capture the excitement of the the early holiday season and the enthusiasm of the young dancers. My strategy was to join them as they were preparing for the parade – meeting at the lobby of the local museum, lining up in their spot long before the start of the parade, doing the sound checks, going over their dance routines again and again to keep warm on a cold November evening. The performance itself probably counted for 80% of the impact on the spectators and took 20% of the effort from the dancers, considering all the hours they spent preparing for the show. But I think that it is capturing the other 80% of the event from the participants’ perspective is what makes the memories recorded in the photos valuable and gives them emotional content.

November 23, 2015

Why email is like fast food

Email has some tangible advantages over real-time communications such as phone calls or face-to-face conversations. To me personally, the main advantage is the ability to respond to emails at a convenient time. There is also an opportunity to pause before hitting the “Send” button, to re-read my response and to edit it if needed.

But this very feature of taking the conversation off-line, the ability to make it less spontaneous, also tremendously detracts from the depth of the communication. I recently listened to an interview with Prof. Sherry Turkle, who wrote a book about this called “Reclaiming Conversation”. Most points that she makes seem obvious in retrospect, but they are easy to overlook in the everyday life.

She draws an analogy between human desire for genuine communication with cravings for food – both are results of our evolution as social and biological beings. Just like it is convenient to satisfy food cravings by grabbing a quick bite at a fast food joint, so it is appealing to satisfy our craving for communication by periodically checking and replying to emails. Also, eating fast food is not necessarily a social event, and similarly, the non-spontaneous nature of email exchanges appeals to the introverts among us. However, just as a cup of soda with a serving of French fries are not a true substitute to a three-course meal at a fine restaurant, so the snippets of online communication cannot replace face-to-face conversations, as uncomfortable and inefficient the latter may seem in comparison.

According to Dr. Turkle, research shows that real, meaningful human connections strongly depend on face-to-face interactions. Ultimately, the quality of communications, even if we consider only one aspect of it, such as information exchange, is increased if they happen face-to-face. As an engineer, I believe there is a balance between efficiency and effectiveness should be considered here, but there are implications of the importance of meaningful personal contact in nearly all areas of our lives.

For myself, how these principles apply in my academic life are obvious, as I mentioned at the beginning. For example, it is well known that quality of teaching is directly proportional to the amount of face-to-face contact with students. In terms of research collaborations too, it is common knowledge that you don’t have a real working relationship with a colleague until you have a meal together, preferably with some alcohol.

In photography also, I find that it is easy to overlook the importance of human relationship (with the clients, the models, the colleagues, the audience) in the continuous pursuit of efficiency and optimization of the production process. I wrote before that it necessary to provide and seek feedback to and from models during a photo shoot. Likewise, many full-time professional portrait photographers agree that building long-term relationships with clients involves learning about them as people, educating them about photography, personally delivering the final photos to them, etc.

Certainly, all this takes time and effort, but it could be argued that all we do in our lives is communicate with other people on various levels, so we might as well keep the quality of the interactions high and not live our entire lives in a superficial, online mode.

November 18, 2015

Honour vs dignity

Both words “honour” and “dignity” carry positive meanings related to integrity in modern language, but I was surprised to learn that in sociology these concepts are, in fact, opposite.

According to Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, the authors of “Microaggression and moral cultures” (2014) Comparative sociology, 13, 692-726, the term “honour culture” describes a paradigm where people are sensitive to slights and insults in order to maintain reputation of physical bravery. In contrast, people living in a “dignity culture” are taught to ignore the slights. The idea there is that responding to a slight would lower the person to the insulter’s moral level. In this respect, dignity culture shares some fundamental ideas with stoicism. Stoics believed that no external forces or circumstances, including insults, can fundamentally hurt them, because their self worth and intentions are not subject to extent influences.

Historically, honour cultures developed where the power of the state was relatively weak, and people had to rely on their reputation for bravery to protect themselves and their families, to pre-emptively deter an aggression. Dignity cultures, on the other hand, rely on a strong state that can be invoked in time of need to quickly and efficiently stamp out a conflict. In the case of an honour culture, a conflict can develop into a prolonged blood feud, for example, where members of two clans keep taking revenge for each consecutive act of violence against them.

It is fascinating that such positive concepts as honour and dignity can be based on mutually-exclusive ideas. While most societies nowadays operate in the realm of dignity, principles of an honour culture have left a prominent mark on the modern world in terms of art, literature, etc. The symbolism created to it still resonates strongly with the emotions of the audience due to the cultural baggage that they we are carrying through generations.

November 10, 2015November 10, 2015

On being stuck

“I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. … What you have to do is separate out the things and do them one at a time.”
— Robert Pirsig “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values“

Recently, I was tasked with writing a text for our Engineering Faculty’s holiday greeting card. It was one of those things that is not so difficult by itself, but that bothers you by lingering on the to-do list. I ended up with this assignment because someone asked if they could use a photo of mine (the one at the beginning of this post) for the card. Surely, I did not object; it was even flattering. When it became apparent that I was expected to write the text too, the kind that could be used for advertisement of our program to prospective students, I was less happy.

Incidentally, I was just reading an excellent analysis of the phenomenon of being stuck (in anything, but specifically in writing) in Robert Pirsig’s brilliant “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. His basic concept is that “…getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all.” The reason is that we are multitasking without realizing it. Specifically, in the case of procrastinating at the beginning of a writing project, we are “…trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard.”

So I decided to make an exercise out of my card-writing task. I systematically listed all the things that could be said about the surf at Botanical Beach and how that relates to engineering (fluid mechanics, West Coast, renewable energy, etc.) Then, given the space limit of about two short paragraphs, I narrowed it down to the things that would be most relevant, and suddenly, it was all done.

Here is the text:

“Waves that form at the ocean surface carry with them large amount of energy and can significantly impact coastal areas, offshore structures and vessels. Study of liquids and gases in motion, including ocean waves, is the subject of fluid dynamics. This area of engineering and science has tremendous potential for discovery and innovation because the underlying physical phenomena are complex and not completely understood.

Researchers at the University of Victoria have been studying ocean waves from a wide range of perspectives – from fundamental research of turbulent flows to design of devices for extracting energy from the waves to assessing the role that renewable energy, including that of ocean waves and currents, would play in sustainable energy systems in the future. This research relies on a large arsenal of state-of-the-art tools and techniques, including numerical modeling of waves and their interactions with energy devices using high-performance computers, visualization and analysis of turbulent flows in laboratory experiments using lasers and high-speed cameras and theoretical modeling of energy systems of entire regions and countries. ”

November 4, 2015

Memories and predictions

When I look through my own photos taken several years ago, I find that I like different images from those that I liked around the time when the photos were taken (I have a record of what I liked in the form of star ratings that I gave the photos in Lightroom). I think that this is, in part, because my tastes and preferences changed over the years. Daniel Gilbert, the author of “Stumbling on Happiness”, explains that people tend to under-estimate how much they change throughout their lives. Looking at my ratings of the old photographs certainly confirms this, at least in my case.

Also, when we form impressions of events, our minds retain only a few key details and fill in the rest with plausible made-up stuff. As it happens (according to Gilbert, who cites references in psychology), we retain more objective details when we process the current events, relative to the events ether from the past (memories) or from the future (which are entirely made-up by our minds). This is an evolutionary safety mechanism – the present events the have immediate relevance have higher priority in terms of use of the processing power of our brains. Incidentally, this is why it makes sense to minimize distractions while doing creative or analytical work. There is a great example of this in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, where the main character argues that motorcycle mechanics, who listen to music at the repair shop, do inferior work.

Unconscious prioritizing of current events is also a reason to process and rate photos as soon as they are taken. There is a narrow time window, where our impression of the photographed events is most detailed and objective. After that windows has passed (or before the event has happened in the case of imagining the future), it is easy for us to subconsciously distort the reality of what happened, what we felt, and even what we saw. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but capturing the impression of the event immediately after it occurred is certainly valuable.

November 3, 2015

Sunsets: noticing beauty of common events

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds

Visual impressions are inherently subjective, so it is a fundamental challenge to prescribe a recipe for an “impressive” photograph, either in terms of the subject or the technique. The are some guidelines, though, that can increase the chances of a particular image being noticed or stirring emotions in people. Typically, these guidelines are rooted in human phychology, more specifically, in phychologycal traits that have developed through years of evolution.

One such trait is that rare events have more emotional impact than common ones. For example, sunsets are more spectacular than solar eclipses, but the latter ones are more memorable, because they are far less common.

Photographers are in a unique position to make even commonplace events memorable. One way to make everyday events more impressive is to highlight their exceptional surroundings or circumstances. For example, I don’t notice the splendor of most everyday sunsets in my home town, but I remember every detail of the one my wife and I watched from Piazzale Michelangelo in Florence during our first trip there.

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