One of the most interesting aspects of sports photography is the ability to show the action up close. I think this is the reason the photos taken with long telephoto lenses generally produce most appealing shots. I wrote earlier about my favourite lenses for shooting indoor basketball. Recently, I have been preferring longer lenses, because they provide a point of view that a spectator cannot replicate from the bleachers. This gives the photos instant “interestingness.”
For tomorrow’s kendo tournament, I am going to shoot mostly with the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens
In photography, an example of this would be building a portfolio that attracts new work, which in turn enhances the portfolio even further. In other areas, examples of reaching the inflection point include learning the basics of a foreign language, which enables one to read books, connect with people, etc., or reaching a certain level of physical fitness, which enables a whole new range of activities: sports, work, travel, etc.. Malcolm Gladwell described a similar phenomenon of viral spread of ideas in his book “
The inspiration for doing these experiments came partially from listening to an interview with Chase Jarvis, who talked about the importance of striving to be different, not just better, at photography as an art. This doesn’t mean to be different just for the sake of it or pursuing attention for the sake of attention. Instead, Jarvis talked about exploring the limits of combining the elements of other artists’ work (he referred to the work of 
My wife and I often combine photography-focussed trips with family vacations. Having a small child substantially changed the dynamics, so the style of the photos have adapted as well. We used to like what 
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I wrote earlier about the importance of 
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Neil Strauss, who interviewed many celebrities for the 
, and is known for his book “
Completing projects, whether it means delivering the photos to the clients or simply clearing the mental RAM by declaring the project finished, is very important for moving on to new projects. I find that it is the latter case, where there is no deliverable per se, but only some vague plans for a certain set of images, that are difficult to mentally resolve and set aside.
Recently, I heard Brian Koppelman, who co-authored screen plays of “
,” among other hit movies, mention in an interview that the value of reading fiction, as opposite to non-fiction, is that people evolved to learn by association and metaphor. Consuming ready-to-use information is efficient for computers, but not necessarily for humans. I believe that there is some fundamental truth in this comment. Besides their entertainment value, artistic images teach us about communication. More generally, infusing information with emotional content, which is what art does, effectively transforms this information into knowledge, which is what 
Kyoto has many famous tourist attractions, and local schoolchildren, knowing that they can count on meeting foreigners there, often approached us with their their school assignments to interview foreign tourists in English. This happened to us so consistently that it quickly became a sort of entertainment. More often than not, the children did not really care about what we answered to their questions, which some of them obviously memorized phonetically, and just recited on cue. Sometimes, they would not wait for the previous question to be finished before reading their own. Still, they seemed genuinely happy and full of the sense of accomplishment by having completed their part of the “interview a foreigner” script.