My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
During the recent trip to Milan, I had a chance to take some photos of the people working on the cathedral. Since my research is related to acoustics, I was particularly interested in the work of acousticians, who were sampling the sound of the organ by moving the microphone to various locations in the nave and recording several repeating notes and musical fragments.
I think the reason why photographs remain popular even though video conveys more information is that the time commitment associated with video is much larger than that of photography. This applies to all aspects, starting from production, where editing takes an enormous amount of time from a photographer’s perspective (in my experience, and I have heard others confirm it, the rule of thumb is one hour of editing for every minute of video for short clips.) The content consumption stage, i.e. watching a video, also requires more time that watching a photo. A photo can be hung on a wall and enjoyed every time our eye falls upon it, while a piece of video mush be viewed in its entirety to be appreciated.
Certainly, having water in some form as part of the image adds some an aspect of interest to the photo. This is a well-known fact in landscape photography, but I recently came across a surface-tension-related subject on a street in Amsterdam – two street performers creating giant soap bubbles using a rope dipped in soap water. Incidentally, I found that I could temporally resolve burst of the bubble using a 10 frames per second burst of my Canon EOS-1D X
Street artists were hard at work at Plaza Balcón de Europa in Nerja (Spain) every night during our stay there. Their popularity among tourists obviously varied. The cartoonist who drew funny caricatures of models was, by far, the most popular artist. His skill was great, both in observation of the distinguishing features of his clients and in the drawing technique itself.
This time, observing the cartoonist, I was wondering how this artist was able to maintain his motivation to set up shop on the daily basis. Perhaps, the difference in the production processes between his “analog” drawing and digital photography is the key. Even though he worked very fast, he still spent considerable time on small details (which is the most fun, in my personal experience) and on what would be referred to in photography as “post-processing” – adjusting and manipulating the image that he had captured in his mind. Maybe, the way to stay motivated and to have fun with photography is to allow sufficient time to think about and work on individual images – something that is easy to lose in the digital workflow. 
Milan’s Duomo is an incredibly imposing Gothic cathedral. It took nearly six centuries to build, but the result is stunning. What impressed me the most is probably the attention to detail, even the details that would not be normally visible to the public.
I climbed to the terraces on my first day in Milan, because the weather was nice, and I did not want to miss the opportunity to shoot the skyline through the lace of the Gothic stonework. In retrospect, it was a good decision not to postpone the climb. Every evening afterwards, it rained during the hours with the best light.
This month’s calligraphy is a saying by a Chinese poet, who as a child had a dream of a flower emerging from the tip of a brush. This turned out to be a prophecy of his future greatness.
It is curious how many important people had their greatest ideas come to them when they were not consciously thinking (Newton’s apple story is one famous example.) I think this is a perfect reason (besides all the health benefits) for getting more sleep. This is my excuse reason for making this post so short.
Although a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a subject of a photo shoot is so vast that it is difficult to decide what to start with. This is often the case with travel photography, as every country’s story can be told in many different ways: through its architecture, food, people, arts, etc.
Josh Waitzkin
It is fascinating that in 1960’s, in the Soviet Union, fictional Cheburashka and his friends were bringing small groups of friends together, which is not unlike “blue zone” social projects that occupy progressive minds of the present day US of A.
“Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.”
-Robert M.Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
For example, one could use analytic classification as an approach to art. This, in fact, has been done throughout the ages by using the principles of geometry, psychology and optics in architecture and painting. An extreme example of perfect symbiosis of the “classic” and the “romantic” approaches in Seurat
The inverse (applying the “romantic” approach to science) is a bit less obvious, but I believe it can be done very effectively. There are two points of opportunity for this in a scientific workflow: 1) examining and communicating the impact of the phenomenon under consideration as a whole, before it has been analyzed and 2) looking for and pursuing the aesthetics in the analytic process itself.
Using self-imposed constraints in the way the information is delivered can make the message more powerful. Similarly, economy of information, i.e. how much of it is being transmitted, is also an important concept. Amanda Palmer pointed this out in her interview with Tim Ferriss in relation to music, but I believe it also applies to visual arts and teaching.
On a similar note, teaching often fails by providing the students with too much content (for their level of knowledge, duration of the class, etc.) and rarely (if ever) by giving too little information. Leaving something for self-study allows the students to engage with the material and make it “their own”. I must say that having just finished teaching a relatively large course, I am looking forward to limiting the course-related information that I both receive and transmit to bare minimum for the next few months.
