My nine-year-old daughter received a Lava lamp as a New Year’s present. The initial start-up takes a long time. I comment that the lamp’s design dates back to the 1960s.
“That’s why it takes so long to load!” she remarks.
…
Photo vs. video
As I’ve been working on my video-making skills during the COVID-forced remote teaching terms, I’ve noticed that photo- and videography offer very different experiences both from the creator’s and the viewer’s standpoint. I tried to analyze why this is the case, and came to the following hypothesis.
A still image creates a synthetic experience for the viewer. All the information in the picture is presented at once, so the viewer can make up their own version of the story. This doesn’t mean that it’s a synthetic experience for the creator, though. Actually, it takes a series of distinct, sequential steps to create a still image. For example, in the photography context, it could mean setting up the lighting, taking the photo and post-processing it. The sequential nature of still image-creation is even more apparent in classical painting, which involves sketching, mixing colours and painting multiple layers to render the form to various degrees of detail in the different parts of the image. The the finished painting is presented to the viewer, they see it all at once: the entirety of the shapes, colours and all the paint layers. It is then the job for the viewer’s brain to synthesize this information and formulate a story.
A movie, on the other hand, is an actual story. The viewer cannot ingest it all at once. The information has to be consumed as a sequence that was deliberately laid out by the author. Ironically, the process of creating a video is, in a sense, synthetic in that the author needs to have the entire process in their head, from how the footage needs to be shot to how it is going to be edited. Of course, post-processing is a big part of still photography too, but when I shoot photos, I am generally not making specific plans of how I am going to process them. With video, though, I am constantly re-evaluating how the footage I am capturing would be spliced together in the final product.
I think this difference in how the still and moving images are created and consumed is the reason that the emergence of mainstream video production did not result in extinction of still photography. The two genres are simply too different.
Optimizing fun
A conversation I had with my nine-year-old daughter:
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“The videos I’ve been making for my class.”
“Do you have fun making them?”
“I do, but it takes a lot of time, so I am thinking about how to make them faster.”
“So you would have less fun?”
“… No, I would still have fun, just faster.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
…
I think she has a point…
On the value sketching
I realized a while ago that sketching is a good exercise for developing observation skills and, more generally, memory. It requires full concentration, because the subject is usually not standing still, and one needs to be able to consciously think about which features of the subject are essential and which are superficial. The deliberate thinking is important, because it is the mechanism that allows committing the visual information to long(er)-term memory. The short-term memory (the one in which information lives for a couple of seconds) is not sufficient for preserving the visual details until they can be captured on paper.
Lately, I’ve been recording video highlights to supplement lectures in my Advanced Fluid Mechanics course, and one of those is about the importance of being able to make conceptual sketches of flow features for understanding of the underlying physics. Incidentally, one of the forefathers of studies of fluid mechanics was Leonardo da Vinci, whose approach was based on (some would say it entirely consisted of) observation and sketching of the natural phenomena. We are not aiming at Leonardo’s level of artistry in my fluids course, but observation is an important skill for a scientist and an engineer, and sketching is way to develop it.
The book I am recommending in the video is “Boundary-Layer Theory
Smoky skies
We’ve had seriously smoky air in Victoria over the past few days because of the forest fires in the neighbouring Washington state. The level of pollution varies a bit day-to-day, depending on the wind direction and speed. On the first day of my daughters school year, we went outside to take obligatory back-to-school photo, and the light was beautiful. The wind blew some more smoke in over the day, and the children were moved indoors during the recess. This didn’t dampen my daughter’s enthusiasm about being re-united with her friends after six months consisting of the the Coronavirus lockdown in March followed by a rather socially isolated summer holiday.
Today, I took our dog for a walk earlier than usual, hoping that the mist rising off the soccer pitch where we usually go would trap the smoke particles. The air did seem quite fresh at first, but as it warmed up, the fog disappeared, and the smoke came in, so we didn’t stay out for long. A teacher in me made a mental note to use this as an example of psychrometrics in the thermodynamics class that I am going to teach (yet again remotely) next term.
They say the Earth is healing because of COVID-induced slowdown of human activity. Naturally, there are good things about forest fires too,.. once we look back at them as things of the past.
So I think the my daughter’s smoky first school day photo represents our mood in this crazy year quite well – we are still well and somehow remain positive despite being continually reminded that what’s going on in the outside world is utterly beyond our control.
Salmon run video
I have just finished sorting through a bunch of video footage that my wife, daughter and I shot while watching a salmon run at Goldstream Park, which is just outside Victoria along Highway 1. Checking the date stamps of the files, I found that we went there almost exactly on the same day of the year – on November 11 and 12 in 2017 and 2018. It’s a good time of year to see the salmon run. Although the timing of this mysterious natural event varies from year to year, early November gives you a reasonable chance to see a lot of fish while not being nauseated by the smell of their decaying corpses. That would be the unavoidable scene later in the season, typically sometime in December.
I first saw a salmon run at the exact same place, in Goldstream Park, when we moved to Victoria. It had a tremendous affect on me. In fact, the second blog post I’ve ever written was about the salmon run. I felt like I was in the middle of some incredibly important event, and yet, I didn’t know what it was, exactly. It was so significant that thousands of animals were single-mindedly participating in it, paying no attention to the humans with their pathetic efforts to explain what was happening as a purely zoological phenomenon. Biology aside, what these powerful fish demonstrated was an unmistakable and tremendous sense of collective purpose. Perhaps unconscious, but a powerful will nonetheless. And I could only stand there and marvel at it, realizing that I was given a glimpse into something mysterious and so primal that thousands of animals move like a single organism to die for it.
Since then, we try to see the salmon run every year, and every time it moves me emotionally.
Back in 2017, when most of this footage was shot, my then seven-year-old daughter was keen to help with the underwater filming by sticking a GoPro into the shallow stream next to the huge fish fighting for breeding grounds. That was before she discovered that she could talk into the camera, imparting to the world her opinion on every subject that enters her sphere of attention, like any good blogger should. So this is, perhaps, one of the last videos where she is mostly quiet. Enjoy.
Botanical Beach
We haven’t been to Botanical Beach since 2013. My daughter was two years old then. We wanted to make it a fun outing, so I rode my motorbike, and my wife and daughter followed in a car. This time, the whole family rode in the car, including my parents. We stopped to stretch our legs in Jordan River at the appropriately-called Cold Shoulder Cafe (they had no bathrooms and no decaf coffee, which is the only kind my father can take.) Otherwise, it’s a perfectly located pit stop between Victoria and Port Renfrew, where Botanical Beach is.
The distance to Botanical Beach from our home in Victoria is 270 km (round trip.) It’s just long enough to make it a significant excursion, so we don’t go there too often. It is a famous destination for Southern Vancouver Island, and when we just moved to Victoria, we learned early on that timing is important for planning a visit there. The tide needs to be low enough (around 1.5 m or lower) to be able to fully enjoy the tidal pools – the main attraction of this unique place. If you arrive at the beach at high tide, you miss the magic of walking on the exposed oven floor and peeking into the pools that are full of marine flora and fauna. It would be just another beautiful West Coast beach – something that we get de-sensitized to by living in Victoria. The problem is that the lowest tides often occur at an inconvenient time – either too early in the morning or too late at night to fit into a single-day sightseeing itinerary. This time, on a weekend in mid-June, the timing was on our side – the (relatively) low tide was at the middle of the day, so we could take a leisurely drive to the beach.
From the parking lot in Port Renfrew, we meant to take the easiest route to the ocean, worrying that it could be difficult for my parents to scramble across tree roots on the trail. Having not been there for seven years, we miscalculated and took a relatively more difficult trail. It was a lucky mistake, though, because the parents managed the walk well, and it took us directly to the most picturesque part of the beach.
My daughter was delighted by the extraordinary scenery. She spent all the time documenting her impressions on a GoPro. This is her camera of choice these days for recording footage for her soon-to-be-established vlog (a new hobby, spurred by the sharp increase of screen time during remote schooling during the COVID lockdown.) I also carried photo gear – a Sony a7RIV with two lenses (a 70-200 mm and a 24-70 mm) and another GoPro (stay tuned for some videos from inside the tide pools!) It is funny that every time I visit Botanical Beach, I feel compelled to go into photography mode, because the place is so uniquely beautiful. But sinse I go there sufficiently rarely, the technology develops so much that every time my photos are better simply because I have better gear. In a strange way, it feels both good and humbling at the same time.
Eating an elephant
My current painting project is an eight-figure composition. It’s a relatively big deal for me in terms of investment of time and focus. This is partly because I am using a variation of a conventional technique, aiming at a realistic (although not a photo-realistic) result. It involves building the forms in multiple layers, often allowing them to dry between applications.
I keep reminding myself that the way to eat a proverbial elephant is one bite at a time. So I work on this painting in small chunks of time, tackling a small area of the canvas in each session. Currently, I am at a stage when I’ve eaten quite a few bites and starting to feel a bit full, but at the same time realize that what remains is still very much an elephant.
It’s curious how my head works, though. Every now and then, I want to set this picture aside (because of the lack of novelty, no doubt) and start another big painting project. That is like being quite full with the elephant you’ve been eating but dealing with it by ordering another elephant from the menu.
Ways to fail
When I was starting my academic job as a new faculty member, I read a book by Robert Boice appropriately called “Advice for New Faculty Members
It turns out that in teaching, the most common way to fail is do more preparation when encountering teaching challenges (and everyone comes across those at some point.) This is counter-intuitive, but it turns out that teaching prep is a black hole of time that would definitely drain you of any creative energy you might have had at the binning, unless you deliberately and decisively put a limit to how much time you spend on it. On the positive side, and also quite unexpectedly, the data shows that teaching works out just fine for those, who don’t do too much prep. There are good explanations for this fact. In a nutshell, by not being a perfectionist, you can can free up some mental energy to think about the larger context of your life, of which teaching is a part. Having this perspective keeps you from burning out and loathing the prep process and the teaching itself. Ultimately, it makes you are more interesting person and, as a consequence, a better teacher.
In writing, it turns out, there are multiple ways fo fail. Academic writing involves several key components: an the over-arching idea, or hypothesis, for whatever article you are working on, a systematic approach for supporting the idea (testing the hypothesis) and the coherent expression of the results in the context of the existing state-of-the-art. Each of this components presents an opportunity to fail or succeed. So avoiding failure is quite tricky, and, for me personally, this is what makes writing interesting.
I find that the creative process of writing is similar to the classical approach to oil painting in many ways, including the ways you can fail in both endeavours. Assuming that you have a general idea of what you’d like to paint, the first step is to create a rough under painting. It is like a first draft of a written article. In order to have a shot at success, it is important to separate the writing from editing. Likewise, the key thing with under-painting is to quickly move towards sketching out the basic shapes, without being distracted by getting the small details and colours right.
After the underpainting is done, the rest of the process is, essentially, editing. My painting teacher says that what you do is make small corrections (“just by a tiny amount”) to a section of the painting, applying them layer-by-layer. Once the details of each of the small areas of the painting are finished (see below on what is meant here by “finished”), it is time to work on the overall picture, checking that the colours and the tonal values of the different parts do not conflict with each other. Again, this is done by making small corrections in each subsequent layer of paint.
This editing continues until the painting is finished. The criterion for what constitutes a “finished” work is reaching the stage at which you are no longer sure whether applying additional changes makes it better or worse. So there is a real possibility of making things worse than they were by not stopping at the right moment. Incidentally, this is the main argument for taking frequent breaks from your work, even at the risk of interrupting a flow state. Doing so allows you to take a more detached, if not completely objective, look at the current state of your work and thus avoid making costly mistakes. My sculpture teacher emphasized this, and that is what Boice described as “finishing early,” i.e. before you feel ready – another common technique of successful academics.
Pieces of art that are utter failures fail in every single aspect – the details are wrong and they don’t fit together into the larger composition. Paintings of beginner students are often like this. But even more advanced artists often fail in one or more aspects. Sometimes the perspective is a bit off, the colours clash, or the tonal relations are wrong, even though the rest of the elements are fine. Even Leonardo’s paintings are not free of errors (which shows that he was human after all).
Arguably, each colour selection and ultimately each brushstroke represents a creative decision that carries a possibility of success or failure. I believe that decisions involved in painting a picture are fundamentally more difficult than those that many of us, or at least me personally, face in what we call our “professional” work. And, assuming that we are painting as a hobby, our identities are not tied up into the result as tightly as they are in the “real work”, so the perceived stakes are not as high. I think that is what makes painting so enjoyable – it provides an opportunity to learn about various failure modes and to do so safely.
On teaching
My academic work is nominally divided into research, teaching and admin stuff, with the first two categories taking up the majority of time and effort. One of the issues with teaching, as I personally see it, is the lack of continuity. Once a particular course is finished, it feels as if nothing tangible remains of the work that went into it. Of course, I do realize that the real impact of teaching is in the knowledge transmitted to the students and, hopefully, in the positive impact it will have on their lives. This is all fine, and it does indeed make teaching rewarding. Still, at the end of each term, it seems like I have just emptied a bucket of water into a sea – some work has been done, but the result is not visible.
In that sense, our rapid transition to online teaching in the face of spreading COVID-19 virus has had an unexpected positive effect – it prompted me to make short videos of historical tangents and anecdotes to accompany my otherwise dry lecture notes in fluid mechanics and energy conversion. I did it in response to feedback from my students, who wrote that these tangents indirectly helped them internalize the information and convert it to knowledge. During normal, face-to-face lectures, I would use the anecdotes to break up the monotony of the material. Once we moved to remote teaching, I found that planning, recording and editing the videos provided the motivation for myself to keep going with teaching.
Somehow, when a video is published, it is satisfying to know that it will have a life of its own in the inter-webs long after the course is finished, the exam is written, the marks are assigned and the material is largely forgotten by the students.
Here is an example of historical reference from the early days of computational fluid dynamics (CFD):
And here is a funny Greek metaphor for extracting work from mixture separation: