People – Page 8 – Peter Oshkai photography

January 7, 2015January 7, 2015

Street photography in China

My first overseas trip of 2015 will probably be to a research meeting in Shanghai. I have been to China only once before, attending a similar meeting in Beijing. During that trip, I had an opportunity to explore a little bit of the city on my own, in addition to going on an organized tour of the Great Wall. I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to take street portraits in China. Everywhere, people of various walks of life were incredibly friendly and easygoing, always willing, if not eager, to pose for a photo. I have probably the largest number of shots with strangers making eye contact with the camera from that trip than from any other country.

This time, I am looking forward to going to China gain, partly being inspired by my current bedtime read, “Reamde” by Neal Stephenson, where some of the action takes place in China. If time permits, I will try to find some part of the city a little bit off the beaten tourist path. In Beijing, some of my most vivid experiences were from a district containing a maze of narrow streets and run-down houses, which I sought out on purpose. Actually, it turned out to be not nearly as photogenic as I hoped, but I tasted the most delicious (and cheap) Chinese dumplings in my life. It was in a tiny hole-in-a-wall restaurant, where an old woman literally made them after I made a selection from an entirely Chinese-language menu (my rudimentary knowledge of kanji from Japanese lessons helped enormously, to my own surprise), inkjet-printed on a piece of paper, laminated into thick plastic.

Speaking about books, I would like to start looking through the Beijing and Shanghai travel guide that I bought before my last trip. Usually, I leave myself too little time for planning of the touristy part of the business trip. This is really too bad, because I find the anticipation and initial processing the information about the new destination nearly as enjoyable as the travel itself.

January 6, 2015January 7, 2015

Switching off problem-solving by reading books

Recovery is an important part of physical training, and it is also crucial for intellectual and creative work. However, turning off mental problem-solving is quite challenging. Tim Ferris, the author of the famous “4-Hour Workweek” mentioned in his podcast that he read fiction for an hour before bedtime to change his mindset. I have been trying to do the same, although even a leisurely pursuit like this apparently requires some discipline.

The book I am currently reading is “Reamde” by Neal Stephenson. I am enjoying it quite a bit, even though I cannot help constantly comparing it with his, very different in many respects, cult classic “Cryptonomicon.”

I find that another good way to re-focus mental activity is to look at the photographs on 500px. Doing so is very refreshing not only at the end of the day, but any time there are a few minutes that cannot be used otherwise, thanks to a smartphone or a tablet that I almost always have with me. In fact, I am looking forward to enjoying both photos and e-books on the great screen of my shiny (and huge) new iPhone 6 plus. At the first glance, the reading experience is much improved, compared to the old iPhone 5. Stephen King suggested to always have a book handy, and thanks to the ever-evolving technology, I have many of them in my (largest) pocket.

January 5, 2015

Reasons for writing a blog

“Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

Daniel Gilbert

While blogging is different from keeping a diary in that blogging is inherently a public activity, while a diary is usually private, both activities are great tools not only for developing the writing skills and the expertise in the subject of the blog/journal, but also for providing a set of autobiographical benchmarks to the author.

Daniel Gilbert, who wrote a classic book “Stumbling on Happiness” explains in his short TED talk that people tend to underestimate the amount of change their personalities will undergo within the next ten years from the current point in their lives. Thus, it is useful to examine the actual amount of change that that one’s personality (tastes in music, favourite people and places, etc.) experienced in the past ten years. As Gilbert puts it, “it has to do with the ease of remembering versus difficulty of imagining.” A journal or a blog provides a record, a reference point for this retrospective self-examination.

For me, this blog is a way of organizing my notes and thoughts on commonalities between photography (as an art, a business and a research tool), martial arts (as a way of personal development, bushido) and academic life (that of a researcher and a teacher). It is commonly said among photographers that “your first 10,000 photos are your worst” as a reference to the large amount of practice needed to achieve proficiency and to develop personal style. Actually, I think that it is much more than 10,000 photos. Your mileage may vary, of course. After all, talent is a strange thing with a non-uniform distribution among people. Somewhat unexpectedly though, among my first 10,000 photos are some re-discovered personal favourites that I stumbled upon while writing the blog.

December 27, 2014December 28, 2014

Gingerbread house

Another first ever Christmas project for our daughter – decorating a gingerbread house together. She was very excited to help, but it was time for bed before we could finish. Licking the icing off the fingers is, of course, a big part of the experience at this age.

My wife and I took turns taking few candid shots of the house-building process. Our daughter is becoming an experienced model. She was fully aware of the camera, but it did not bother her. In fact, she seems to enjoy being photographed these days. As far as I see in other children, this willingness to pose and relaxed attitude in front of the camera will pass with age. Until it does, I am enjoying the fascinating opportunity to look through the lens at our little girl exploring the world.

December 26, 2014December 27, 2014

Drawing snowflakes

For this year’s Christmas card, I used a portrait of our daughter as a background, on top of which I drew a winter motif in Photoshop. Initially, I looked for various card templates, but decided that it would be more personal (and more fun), to paint the picture by hand.

I sampled the colours from my daughter’s drawing in the photo and painted a snowy tree on a separate layer using various natural-looking brushes in my list of presets. I used a Wacom Intuos Pro Graphics Tablet, with the size and hardness of the brush linked to the pen pressure.

Then, on a separate layer, I drew the streaks made of snowflakes. To do this, I created a custom brush using a snowflake-shaped brush tip (I found a free set of simple snowflake-shaped brushes by doing a Google search) and adding the following dynamics:

Scattering:
- “scatter” setting of approximately 150% with “both axes” box checked – to make each brush stroke consist of individually-visible snowflakes;
- “count jitter” setting of about 75%.
Shape dynamics:
- “size jitter” and “minimum diameter” settings of about 20%;
- “angle jitter” of about 10% – so that the individual snowflakes would be slightly rotated within the single brushstroke.

When my daughter saw the final picture, she said that she drew it. In part she is right – I used elements of her doodles in the picture, which makes it special for me. I think about it as our first collaboration and hope that one day she would be up for drawing something together for real.

December 25, 2014December 26, 2014

Believing in Santa Claus

This Christmas is the first that our three-year-old daughter is consciously enjoying. The anticipation, the gifts, the sweets, the lights – it’s all very real and exciting to her. However, I don’t think she believes in Santa Claus in the sense that it is a man who lands on the roof and leaves the presents. On Christmas day, we had a party with friends, were one of the friends in the Santa costume came in and gave gifts to the children. Our daughter usually shies away from Santa, but this time, she enjoyed the gifts so much that she ran over to give him a hug. I am sure she knew that it was a man in Santa’s costume, though.

What to tell kids about Santa Claus is not as clear-cut question. There is a fine line between magic of the season that can only be experienced in childhood and deliberate deception that can plant a seed of mistrust to the parents. I recently read a review of an out-of-print book by Margaret Mead, and anthropologist, who addressed this question more that fifty years ago. I am glad that my daughter is not attached to the idea of the “real” Santa Claus, but is really enjoying him as an element of the Holiday.

In terms of photography at the Christmas party, as planned, I took a group photo with the camera on a tripod and a self-timer and some candid shots of the kids using natural light and fast prime lenses (Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM and Canon EF 85mm f1.2L II USM) on a Canon EOS-1D X. Here is the most important adjustment that I had to make in order to achieve sharp focus since I started using these lenses, which produce ultra-shallow depth of field: it is not possible to pre-focus by half-pressing the shutter button and then re-composing the frame – the resulting slight change in the tilt of the camera results in an out-of-focus image. Instead, I place an autofocus point directly on the subject’s eye (the one closets to the camera, to be exact), take a shot and then adjust composition in post-processing by cropping.

December 24, 2014December 25, 2014

Gift wrapping: delaying gratification

Pamela Druckerman writes in her parenting book “Bringing Up Bébé” that delaying gratification is an important skill for children to learn. As any skill, it requires practice, and the initial attempts are not always successful.

Today, our three-year-old daughter helped us wrap Christmas presents for the first time in her life. Convincing her to stick to wrapping and not to start opening her own gifts was not easy, but she managed to wait until tomorrow and went to bed late at night, full of anticipation. It is fascinating to see her growing up everyday. I wonder which of her experiences will end up being formative for her later in life.

December 23, 2014December 23, 2014

Christmas photos: family and friends

Here is my plan for taking pictures when we get together with our friends’ family this Christmas. I am going to keep photography somewhat low profile, without making a photo shoot instead of the dinner, although I received a specific request to bring the camera (which I take as a compliment).

The friends’ house has a lot of natural light, so I am going to shoot mostly without flash, using fast prime lenses (Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM and Canon EF 85mm f1.2L II USM) on my Canon EOS-1D X.

One thing that I want to take a bit more formally is a group photo. We’ll use it as an excuse to extract everybody from the table at some point. I am going to email the group picture to the friends the same day – instant gratification and ability to share it over social media is more important in situations like this than even qualify of the photo itself. This photo would also be a preview of more pictures to come over the next couple of days, when I have a chance to process them.

Besides the group photo, I am going to take some candid shots of the kids and perhaps a couple portraits of adults. I like to keep the camera handy during the party, but not spend all the time clicking away. Instead, I will do a couple of brief shooting “sessions”, when others have relaxed and are absorbed by conversation, games (in case of children), or whatever else they might be doing.

From experience, I know that the shallow depth of field of the f/1.2 lens will add an artistic quality to the portraits and will make them look less like snapshots.

December 21, 2014December 21, 2014

Would Roman stoics take selfies?

I am truly amazed how much a two-thoudsand-year-old text by Seneca called “On the Shortness of Life” resonates with the modern challenges of work-life balance. On one hand, it is comforting to know that we are not the first to come across these issues, but on the other hand, the fact that two millennia later we are still searching for a solution tells us that, most likely, there is no magic formula that works universally for everyone.

One interesting point that Seneca makes is about people’s relationship with the past. Basically, the past, unlike the present and the future, is “beyond the reach of all human mishaps, and removed from the dominion of Fortune”. He writes that it is true luxury to be able to “roam” into the past days of one’s life and access all of them at will. I think that there is an interesting implication about photography in this concept.

The process of taking a photograph, as everything in our lives, happens in the present, but the resulting image is a record of the past. If the image is “doctored”, it has a potential to change the reality of the past event for the viewer. However, regardless of whether a photo is a faithful depiction of reality or not, for me personally, looking through my own photos that were taken several years ago is what makes the “roaming” into the past vivid and enjoyable. The photos are much more than memory aids. They reflect what interested and bothered me at the time they were taken, my skill level as a photographer, my level of patience and mental flexibility in going after the shot that I wanted to take.

The tough challenge, of course, is precisely what Seneca wrote about – not to lose all this insight into the past by being so “engrossed”, as he calls it, in trivial matters of the day, as not even being able to find time, mood or reason to slow down and look back. At this point, I have tens of thousands of photos that my wife and I took over the last ten years. I think that reviewingt them regularly, perhaps, just a few images at a time, would be at least as useful as shooting new projects.

December 14, 2014December 14, 2014

Importance of teaching

I wrote before about involving people in photoshoots by asking them to model, assist or critique my work. It is especially beneficial to collaborate with other photographers, who are at different levels in terms of their technical skills, creative ability and career. This variety of levels enables one to learn and, just as important, to teach.

In kendo, the continuing development of the technical skill and the philosophical understanding of the way of the sword can be represented by the following diagram. I first learned about it in a kendo seminar, and since then have been using it in my main work as a university professor. I believe the principles apply equally well to photography and, probably, any other serious pursuit in life that involves development of a skill.

Learning diagram

Learning. This is the first stage of the skill development cycle (yes, ultimately it is a never-ending cycle – think about “life-long learning”, a concept that is a bit over-used in academe these days) – acquisition of information. It can take a form of reading a book, being taught by a teacher or a senior colleague/student, etc.
Processing. In order to make use of the acquired information, we must internally process it, make it “our own”. Examples of this, from different fields, are working through homework assignments or research papers, practicing kendo techniques (waza) until they can be performed correctly and without thinking, practicing different lighting techniques in photography, etc.
Teaching. This is a less obvious stage, but it is critically important. In order to continue our own development and avoid stagnation at a certain level, we need to share what we learned with others. Teaching requires deep analysis of the subject and communication skills. In order to transmit our knowledge to others, we have to identify the the essence of it.

The arrow that connects “Teaching” and “Learning” in the diagram is very interesting. At some point in teaching, we begin to learn from our students. In a sense, they become our teachers, and the cycle continues. In kendo, this aspect is acknowledged in a very direct way, when both the sensei and the student bow to each other. In photography, I am always grateful when I have an opportunity to answer someone’s question or when someone teaches something to me.

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