Techniques – Page 14 – Peter Oshkai photography

February 9, 2015February 9, 2015

To do or not to do

“No! Try not. Do, or do not. There is no try.”
– George Lucas (Yoda, “Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back“)

I wrote earlier about the importance of exploring new subjects and techniques for one’s development as a photographer and an overall well-rounded person. It is equally important to practice the skill of not pursuing new projects, as James Altucher explains in his book “The Power of No.” Because time, as well as energy, emotional, financial and other resources are inherently limited, there is a very real cost of pursuing new opportunities. it needs to be weighed against the potential benefits, and of course, this is the most difficult part.

Taking up a new project implies a commitment to complete it one way or another, and this aspect alone diminishes freedom to choose to do something else in the future.

Having said this, there is also an inherent risk in choosing not to do new things. In fact, a finite probability of failing at something new becomes a certainty the moment we decide not to try it. Besides, it is often difficult to fail at something completely, which can make make even a failed attempt quite valuable as many authors, who advocate thinking big point out.

February 8, 2015February 8, 2015

Two-stage workflow

I like Rick Steves’ travel guides for high-level vacation planning – an overview of must-see sites in a country that can be realistically visited in a given amount of time. He often mentions, that any country is like a good novel – best enjoyed when visited for the second time. I think this two-stage approach works well for many aspects of photography – planning, shooting, processing, etc.

During the initial stage of a portrait photo shoot, for example, assuming that there would be another chance to re-visit certain aspects, explore additional angles, poses, lighting arrangements, etc. removes the stress of having to accomplish everything perfectly at the first try. This allows me to spend more time on details of the individual shots and on obtaining feedback from other people, who are involved in the shoot (photographers, models, assistants).

The second stage of the shoot, which I really takes place after a break, is where the most unexpected and interested photos are taken. Both the models and the photographers relax, knowing that the must-have images have already been captured. The resulting openness and ease in the interaction between them gives the the portraits from the follow-up session a subtle but important sense of realism and authenticity.

Neil Strauss, who interviewed many celebrities for the Rolling Stone, and is known for his book “The Game” about pickup artists, mentioned that he liked conducting the interviews in two stages, because people tend open up during the second take. I think that a two-stage interaction is not a technique to manipulate people, but simply a way to work with the fact that developing any meaningful relationship or collaboration is a process that takes time. More generally, it applies to learning, which involved developing a connection with the subject.

February 7, 2015February 7, 2015

Finishing projects

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.

Currently, I am contemplating a painting (not a digital one, but actual oils on canvas) in the style of The Group of Seven, but a set of unprocessed images from a recent dance show keeps me from taking up the brush.

I only briefly looked through the dance images, and believe that some of them are quite interesting. I am really looking forward to trying some new post-processing techniques on them, so the painting would have to wait for now.

February 6, 2015February 6, 2015

Value of art

Sometimes, it seems that the value of art is purely in its entertainment aspect. I believe that this is misleading, as art has a tremendous potential to educate us about universal principles that govern various fields, particularly about human nature, which plays a role in everything we do.

These days, we have to carefully manage consumption of information, which is conveniently and constantly available to us in various forms. Since our inbound bandwidth is limited, it may seem productive to limit the consumed information to that with immediately practical value, e.g. technical and non-fiction literature, documentary movies, reportage and scientific photos, etc. However, doing so would lead to missing the potential to expand our knowledge base beyond what is necessary to function on the daily basis within our current social and professional roles. In other words, focussing only on what is immediately and obviously useful does not provide an opportunity of significant, i.e. non-incremental, learning.

Recently, I heard Brian Koppelman, who co-authored screen plays of “Rounders” and “Solitary Man,” 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 learning is.

February 5, 2015February 5, 2015

Vulnerability vs. helpfulness

In teaching, relating the teacher’s personal experience with the material, including initial failures or struggles in learning it, is an important tool for establishing a working connection with the students. This is relevant to teaching in a general sense, not necessarily limited to the scope of academe. For example, in the context of photography, I find that showing some vulnerability by making it clear that I am in the process of learning the craft, helps avoid appearing as a know-it-all. Of course, this applies to interactions with other photographers, and not with clients or models, with whom projecting confidence in one’s skills is of paramount importance.

On the other hand, to instil confidence in the students and to be genuinely helpful, the teacher must make it clear (either explicitly or implicitly) early in the interaction that he/she know the answer to the problem at hand or is well underway towards finding the solution in the case of an open-ended, complex issues. In any case, discussing past personal struggles would not appear helpful, if it comes out as whining, instead of deliberately chosen example of learning from one’s experience.

Some examples of good balance between vulnerability and helpfulness are writings of James Altucher, such as “The Power of No,” which is largely based on his personal stories.

February 1, 2015

Children’s books

My three-year-old daughter loves books. Some of her favourites are “Lost and Found” and “Up and Down” by Oliver Jeffers. Because she likes them so much, I started paying attention to them myself and became fascinated with the illustrations and how masterfully they complement the story.

At first, I could not quite put my finger on what makes Jeffers’ images so special. Now, I think that it is how he uses negative space. Both in his text and pictures, what is not shown (or said) is at least as important as what is.

Couple of days ago, I came across Jeffers’ “Once Upon an Alphabet” at a bookstore and liked it so much that I had to buy it, even though it is still too advanced for my daughter’s age. This made me think that books and illustrations (as well as music) that are originally aimed at children and span several generations are probably some of the most important contributions to society that an artist (or writer, or musician) can make, because the audience is at its most perceptive and innocent state.

Not being so presumptuous as to aim for “a giant leap for mankind” with my photographs, as an experiment, I will try to (a) look for subjects/themes that a child could relate to and (b) work more with negative space in my composition.

January 31, 2015January 31, 2015

Pre-meditated spontaneity

On a dark and cold Saturday morning, I walked to a local cafe only to find it closed – the guy, who was supposed to open it, did not show up. While my original motivation for these Saturday morning walks was to break my usual morning routine, in other words, to deliberately have no defined pans, it turned out that looking forward to a hot cappuccino is itself a plan. Not surprisingly, unmet expectations are not fun.

It is well known that fear of not meeting one’s expectations often prevents us from trying new things. It turns out, though, that the so-called “worst case scenario,” in many cases, is not that bad in the big scheme of things. In the trivial case of the closed cafe, for example, I ended up having a (probably better) cup of coffee at home together with my wife.

Stoic philosophers like Seneca (whom, by the way, some consider to be a bit of a hypocrite, because he was a very wealthy person, despite his stoic teachings) recommended practicing coping with worst case scenarios as an effort to face one’s fears. They would pick certain days, during which they would limit themselves to the most basic food, clothes, etc. The idea is that if one learns to be content with the worst conditions, he (Romans were not politically correct, so they probably did not think that any of this applied to women) would be more confident in handling typical daily challenges.

So, if one can deliberately experience poverty or shame, can the same be done with spontaneity? I don’t see why not. I think it would be quite useful to anticipate that at some point in a project things will not go according to plan, and anticipate that it would be necessary engage intuition and creativity to the maximum. In fact, I sometimes engineer these creative or technical challenges by imposing constraints on my photography workflow. …Ok, sometimes, I just don’t plan ahead well enough, so the challenges arise naturally. Still, I’d like to think that treating the challenges as opportunities for learning is what the stoics would do.

January 30, 2015January 30, 2015

Seeing the big picture

“You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over−familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well.”

– Miyamoto Musashi, “The Book of Five Rings“

In my academic research, I am often faced with a choice of exploring a new subject or focussing deeper on my core area of expertise. It is the well-known dilemma of specializing versus generalizing. Professional photographers face the same question when they decide to niche down on a specific subject or remain generalists.

Tim Ferriss, who wrote a very popular book about learning called “The 4-Hour Chef,” made compelling arguments for being a generalist. Specifically, being proficient in many areas allows one to see the big picture, recognize and explore connections and similarities between these areas. Aspiring to be the “jack of all trades and master of many”, as Ferris puts it, is also inherently more fun, and thus more conducive to happiness in daily life than forcing yourself to niche down for the sake of rapidly diminishing returns on your investment of effort in one specific activity.

I think that being a professional photographer, but not investing your entire identity into it, paradoxically, makes you a better photographer in the long term. This is somewhat similar to budo, the way of the martial arts, following which on a certain (high) level requires exploring other human activities, learning about human nature and applying this knowledge to one’s core area of expertise. In fact, Minamoto Musashi, who stated the principles for following the Way of Strategy in his “Book of Five Rings” (Go Rin no Sho), instructs: “Become aquatinted with every art.” and “Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.”

January 29, 2015January 29, 2015

The skill of observation

“The world is full of obvious things”

– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles“

I noticed a while ago, that many of my colleague in academia (most of them engineers or scientists) have strong personal interests in creative activities like art, photography, writing, etc. I have been wondering what aspects are common between the creative process and knowledge work, such as academic research. This question comes up every now and then in the discussions of whether artistic training is meaningful for people of other professions (I think there is an implicit assumption that is different parts of the rain are responsible for intuitive and logical thought processes, the two ways of thinking are not generally applicable to the same problems).

I think the common skill that is important to both artists and scientists is the skill of observation. Learning to observe one’s environment and people within it is the core of the artistic training. There is a book by Alexandra Horowitz called “On Looking: A Walker’s Guide to the Art of Observation,” which explores how thoughtful observation of trivial details reveals the world as seen through other people’s eyes.

Of course, observation alone is not sufficient. The process of creating an object of art also involves communicating the information crystallized through observation to the audience. The skills of observation, processing of information (identifying key elements) and communicating it to others easily translate to academic work, or most other activities, for that matter. So I would like to think that my taking photos or practicing kendo indirectly benefits my research. This seems to work for many prominent colleagues, so I am sticking with it.

January 28, 2015January 28, 2015

Developing a unique style

Technical proficiency is a foundation of any activity, including all genres of photography, but it is deviations from the conventional standards that constitutes a unique, personal style. That is, until other people start to imitate them. Then, the style becomes popular and eventually turns into a new mainstream.

I came across a very insightful interview with Dan Carlin, who publishes a fascinating podcast called “Hardcore History.” I learned about Carlin by listening to “Wrath of the Khans” – a refreshing alternative to revisionist descriptions of the Mongol invasions (e.g. “Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.”) In the interview, Carlin talkes about “copyrighting your shortcomings” (not an exact quote), making them part of the personal brand. In other words, our unique ways of doing things are the essence of our personal styles. In a similar spirit, tea bowls used in Japanese tea ceremony are sometimes deliberately cracked or chipped to give them unique appearance and character. Therefore, in the spirit of turning weaknesses into strengths, it is advisable to work on developing a personal style, rather that trying to imitate someone else.

This argument perfectly translates to photography. Often, deviation from conventional “rules” of composition, lighting, colour management and exposure results in interesting images. Initially, this habits by chance, but by critically analyzing why a particular image “works” (or not) and attempting to reproduce or enhance the same effect in later photographs, we can develop a unique, personal style.

I believe that the difference between the interesting photos that are results of blind luck (and often lack of the technical skill) and the ones that are an expression of a unique style of the artist is that the latter are created deliberately. This concept is similar to kendo, where a strike is considered “valid” (yuko datotsu) when it is executed with intention.

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