Category: Techniques

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Focus

One of the necessary conditions for achieving a flow state (when you are so engrossed in an activity that you lose a sense of time, and the challenges you face seem to be perfectly matched by your skill level at any given moment) is the ability to focus on the task at hand. This is easier said than done, and both the ability of the individual and the nature of the activity play significant roles. Apparently, people who are good at concentrating their attention are able to restrict the input of external information that they are processing. In other words, they can filter out everything that is not relevant to the activity. This enables them to enjoy what they are doing instead of constantly questioning whether they should be doing something else.

As I was reading about this in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book “Flow” (my favourite recent read), I thought that artists (or authors in any creative field) use the same principle to create a more focused, and therefore more enjoyable, experience for the audience. For example, in photography, we use shallow depth of field to isolate the subject from the background. This way, we do the pre-filtering of the visual input for the viewers, so they have a better visual experience.

Another photography technique that uses the same idea and that I find particularly useful is covering candid environmental portraits to black-and-white. I did it most recently when shooting dance classes at a local studio. In that particular case, while the subjects themselves are photogenic, the background of the dance studio, littered with clothes, shoes and bags of various bright colours, is definitely not. Removing the colour information from the image guides the viewer’s attention to the subject by literally reducing the input bandwidth. I also often use this technique in street photography, where the colours of the background scene are not only impossible to control but also irrelevant to the subject.

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Simplicity

I’ve just finished reading a rather Machiavellian book “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. Part of it’s appeal is simplicity of the concepts of military leadership that are presented there. In fact, the authors make a compelling case for simplicity being a necessary condition for effectiveness of a mission plan. Not-surprisingly, the book also plays on the universal applicability of the principles of military strategy. From my experience, I can attest that at least some of these principles apply in science and art.

As it happens, I’ve been working on a research proposal that is supposed to outline my research program for the next five years. The issue is that the adjudicating panel spans a range of expertise, but none of the panelists is exactly in my area. Hence the need to simplify the description of my work. This may seem like a limitation for the proposal, but it’s actually a great thing. I find it very helpful to have main objectives to be formulated with enough simplicity that I can keep them on top of my mind on a daily basis as I work with graduate students, who do the actual research work. This makes making everyday micro decisions easy: does this move us closer to the objective? When the description of the goal is simple, this loaded question reduces to a yes-or-no one.

The same principle applies to photography. My camera is pretty advanced, and there is a nearly infinite number of combinations or lenses and settings that I could use. However, I find that it is most effective to simplify things. I only have a few combinations of settings: for action (maximum aperture, fast shutter speed, auto ISO, high framing rate, continuous focus), for portraits (same as above, but slower shutter speed, sometimes, manual low ISO), for landscapes (narrow aperture, low ISO, single-shot focus, single frame drive). There are othe creative scenarios beside these, but they are exceptions. So the question of choosing the settings, which can be overwhelming to a beginner photographer, can actually be simplified to “what are you trying to achieve?” And the beauty is that there are only few answers: freeze (or blur) motion, separate the subject from the background (or maximize the depth of field). This classification of shooting scenarios is so simple that it frees me to mostly think about composition, which is always important.

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Shooting video

I find blogging to be a useful exercise for organizing my thoughts and formulating ideas for photoshoots, research projects, future travel, etc. Basically, it serve a purpose of note-taking. There is a concept, neatly outlined in Charles Duhigg’s book “Smarter Faster Better” that some kind of mechanism of capturing and periodically reviewing one’s observations and thoughts is an essential tool for learning. In other words, don’t just read a book – write down what you’ve just learned. Also, don’t just look at scenery – photograph (or better yet, draw) what you are seeing.

Somehow, shooting video makes for a drastically different experience for me than, say, taking still photos or writing down text notes. For example, videography seems to distract me from the experience of the present moment much more than still photography. Whatever happens on camera seems more like a performance than a real event. Intellectually, I realize that this is a false perception, and shooting video can also be viewed simply as a means of taking notes. In fact, the amount of information that is recorded in video is significantly larger than what’s captured in photos or written notes. I think the difference is that still photography and note-taking forms you to do some processing of the information on the fly and record only the most significant parts. In video, this is deferred to the post-processing stage, which incidentally makes the reviewing of the raw footage quite daunting.

Here is a couple of practical ways that come to mind for overcoming the apparent difficulty with producing video:
a) Shoot selectively, with at least a general meaning of each particular clip in mind.
b) Treat video as a note-taking tool, not as an artistic performance. Deliberately exercise a delay between capturing raw footage and making a movie.

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Warm evenings

Last couple of evenings have been uncharacteristically warm for Victoria. Usually, even in the summer, the moist air from the ocean is just cool enough to make staying outside at dusk uncomfortable without a sweater or a warm jacket. This is one thing that we miss about Italy – enjoying the outdoors in the evenings.

The last few days were exceptional, though. The perfect weather also coincided with the peak of tulip blooming. So this weekend, we made the most of both – went to the Butchart Gardens and did some sketching/painting of the flowers while sitting on the lawn until the closing hours. As we were getting ready to leave, we found out that the gardens stayed open until late at night that day because of the arrival of a cruise ship. So we had a chance to stroll through nearly-empty gardens at sunset, which is a rare occasion in any season, but particularly this time of year, when so many people come there to see the tulips. The weather was so nice that we decided to flip the dinner and start it by eating ice cream at the outside cafe before heading home.

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Justifying fun

In his auto-biographical “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”, Richard Feynman criticized physics textbooks of his day by saying that most examples in them were written by people, who never tried to replicate the problems as experiments (for example, to illustrate friction, one could have timed how long it would take a rolling ball to stop on different surfaces). When I first read it, I thought how much fun it would be to do things not for their potential value or impact, but simply for “the pleasure of finding things out”, as Feynman put it. But at the same time, I thought that it would be prohibitively impractical: who would be interested in a simple friction experiment that must have been done countless times before?

It is justification of trying and doing fun things that what I, and probably most other people, struggle with. Perhaps, one way to think about it is to somehow link the individual fun experiments into larger-scale projects. Perhaps, thinking about them as contributing to a “body of work“, e.g., learning a skill, developing a relationship with a child, etc.

Speaking about doing fun things with children, last week, I learned that a cheetah, my daughter’s favourite animal, can cover 7 m in a single stride. This came from the illustrated book called “Animal!” that she spent a lot of time with over the Spring break. As a side note, the photographs in that book and nothing short of amazing – quite inspiring. In the spirit of Feynman’s suggestion, we measured 7 m with a measuring tape, and it turned out that a cheat could jump across both our living and dining rooms at once! I must say that it is one thing to read about 7 meters in a book and another to see what it looks like in reality. Power of a physical demonstration in action!

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Developing new skills

At the last tournament, I repeatedly tried to hit the opponent’s kote (lower arm just above the wrist), but judges gave me no ippons for any of the hits. I think this is because my strikes were not sharp enough. There is a particular quality of hits that’s needed to score points in kendo. It is not the force that counts, or even not the speed per se, although speed is important. It is precisely sharpness, snappiness of the hit. And I cannot do it at my current level. At least not consistently.

This presents a conundrum that applies beyond kendo to learning any new skill: how do you practice something that you cannot (correctly) do yet? If you practice using your current, incorrect, form, you risk reinforcing bad habits.

One option is to break down the skill into its constituent parts and work on them one-by-one before trying to connect them. This is how I work on the basics of violin-playing: First, work on the rhythm of a new song using a single open string. Second, get the left hand into position for playing correct notes without paying attention to rhythm or quality of sound. Third, focus on the sound quality (bow movement). Fourth, try to connect everything together and circle back to the rhythm.

In the case of a kote strike, however, the overall motion is already so short and simple that it doesn’t make sense to break it down further. But the overall quality of my kote hit is lacking, so something needs to be done. According to my sensei, the answer is to practice a different, but related, motion, which will eventually support and enable whatever you are trying to perform. In the case of the kote strike, the supporting exercise is matavari suburi – large-amplitude, straight swing of the shinai with maximum speed and an abrupt stop at the end of the swing. I’ve began doing it as my morning warm-up, but haven’t done enough yet to see any qualitative difference in my kote strikes. If anything, it will teach me not to over-extend my elbows at the end of a strike – something that’s annoyingly painful and potentially dangerous.

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Things I like

One of the things I look forward to every week is waiting for my daughter while she goes to an art lesson after school. I sit at a cafe next door to the studio, and the one hour I have there feels like a bonus time to catch up on things that usually get crowded our of my day. I am glad that she is doing something that she enjoys and that, at the same time, I can work on something without the pressure to be productive.

Surprisingly, productivity takes care of itself, probably because I don’t rush to finish anything in particular and can actually think about what I am doing. I can think about the paper I’ve been reviewing and how it relates to my own research instead of rushing to finish and submit the review, as I often do in the office during “regular” work hours. Or I feel free to play with photos on my phone or computer to explore new processing techniques. Or I can read my own notes on the books that I’ve read in the past. Sometimes, I surprise myself with the ideas that I had at the time, but completely forgotten.

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Body of work

Yesterday after work, I had a five-hour long photo shoot of dance classes in a local studio. I shot around 3500 images, which take approximately 150 GB of hard drive space. I like shooting dance, and I have a personal interest in the subject, because my daughter goes to that dance school. I also like the fact that this a great opportunity to practice my action-shooting skills. Having said this, I am glad that I don’t do this kind of photography every day. In fact, I believe that shorter, but more regular and varied shoots are better for developing skills and creativity.

I recently heard about the value of creating a consistent body of work. I am not sure who said it, but I like the idea that what we do every day is more valuable than what we do every once in a while. For example, my yesterday’s shoot was a big one-time effort, but shooting daily, even a little bit, even just using my phone, is probably more important. Ironically, the next day after a big shoot I am reluctant to pick up the camera at all.

I can really relate to treating all projects not as one-off opportunities, but as stepping stones for creating a consistent body of work. Of course, as many useful concepts, it is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it removes pressure of “successful” performance from each individual project (e.g. a research grant proposal or journal paper submission). On the other hand, if you are always contributing to your body of work, you cannot slack off at any time because you might think a particular project at hand is relatively unimportant. You have to be always “on”, delivering your best work.

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Habits are synthetic

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I have started reading “Better Than Before” by Gretchen Rubin, and in the introduction, she writes that habits are powerful because they eliminate the necessity of decision-making, which, she also argues, is a finite resource. Basically, you make decision once and then follow a habitual sequence of steps to the desired result without thinking about the individual steps.

This reminded me of the “Creation and Destruction” essay by John Boyd, which I came across a month ago. Boyd was a military strategist and an instructor of fighter pilots. His theory of making creative decisions is based on a continuous loop of analysis (destruction) of the current reality (and one’s mental model of it) and synthesis (creation) of a new and improved mental model. In this context, a habit, as Rubin describes it, is a synthetic process – you don’t analyze the components of a habit, but instead string them together into one complex action.

Acting without thinking, but in a way appropriate to the situation is, of course, a central concept in martial arts. In kendo, it is called mushin. And just as an everyday habit, the instinctive reaction in a fight is developed through repeated practice.

Being a fairly universal principle, habit-forming can be applied practically to everything. For example, in photography, say, I decide that I want to freeze action of dancers during a performance. I select a ‘fast’ lens, open the aperture wide, set the shutter speed high, autofocus – to continuous tracking mode, framing rate – to ‘high’ and from that point on worry only about composition and catching the dynamic moments. Actually, even this preliminary setup becomes habitual with practice. I only need to think ‘freeze action’, and the rest happens more or less on autopilot.

Of course, as Gretchen Rubin also mentions, habits are great servants, but terrible masters. They makes us more efficient, but in doing so rob us of the actual experience of the action. When you hit a pause on Boyds Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop and delegate part of the sequence to a habit, you sacrifice present-moment awareness. Autopilots, after all, are not famous for their creativity.

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Music and air combat

Air show. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.

My violin-playing assignment for the Christmas break is practicing the D major and the A major scales. Finally. When I started the lessons with my daughter four months ago, I expected that I would be doing only “scales and arpeggios” , like Berlioz from “The Aristocats” – the movie that at the time shaped my view of music education.

I can see that breaking up the established muscle memory and coordination between my right and left hands is not going to be easy. That is why kids have an advantage in learning music – they don’t have years of muscle memory to unlearn.

For myself, as a late-starter in music, I see it as a good opportunity to practice John Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” principle. I recently came across his essay of the same title, and it is a fascinating read. Boyd himself was an amazing character. He developed a highly-influential Energy-Maneuverabilty theory of air-to-air combat. His writing is to-the-point practical and concise but also surprisingly deep in the underlying philosophy.

One of the main ideas is that creative process (he used the process of decision-making as an example) is really a combination of analysis (“destruction”) of the existing mental models in view of the current observations of reality, followed by synthesis (“creation”) of new and improved models from the individual components (concepts, ideas, etc.) that are the result of breaking apart the old models. In other words, breaking-down and building-up go hand-in-hand in a continuously repeating loop. In fact, one of the best-known results of Boyd’s work is the Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action (OODA) loop, which has been the foundation for training of fighter pilots and design of fighter aircraft. There, “Orientation” is the part that contains the analysis and the synthesis of the observed data to form a current mental perspective.

With music, five-year-olds have an advantage over adults in that they have less breaking-down (of existing habits) to do before they can get to the creative part. On the other hand, I’d like to believe that as an adult, if I do the analysis part of my existing habits well, I would have more material to play with when I am eventually in a position to do some synthesis.

Orchestra pit at Teatro alla Scala. Milan. Italy.
Orchestra pit at Teatro alla Scala. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.
Air show. Milan. Italy.