Category: Techniques

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Micro-progress

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Before starting the treadmill for my lunch-break run, I put on my stylish black-and-red wireless headphones. If I forget to to charge them the day before or put them in the wrong bag it throws a major wrench into my workout. I listen to podcasts during my runs. This means that I am not completely focused on improving my running performance. If I were to follow the deliberate practice concepts, I would not want to be distracted by the soundtrack, but concentrate on my technique all the time – being aware of my stride length, pace and ground contact point relative to my center of gravity. Instead, I am half-way there – I follow a training program generated by the Runkeeper app, which keeps challenging me in terms of the distance and pace, but I do listen to non-running related stuff to distract me from the pain of the workout.

On my last run, I listened to an interview with Frank Shamrock, who made some insightful comments about warrior mindset. Although he talked in the context from which the term actually evolved – martial arts, many of the associated tactics became well-known in other fields, like business, sports and healthcare. A significant part of the warrior mindset is striving for self-improvement on a daily basis.

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The ubiquitous concept of kaizen is usually taken to mean “continuous improvement”. Also, in business context it is often understood to involve all aspects of a company’s operation and all of its personnel. Although the Japanese word “kaizen” itself does not include any notions of continuity or all-inclusiveness (it literally means “improvement”), the continuity of practice and improvement is key in martial arts. This is at least part of the reason why there is a default disdain towards “hobbyist kendo” and the view of many high-level Japanese sensei that foreign kendoka have no appreciation for daily practice.

The improvements don’t have to be large. In fact they can be microscopic in the grand scheme of things, and they don’t have to happen in all areas of performance at once, but there needs to be some improvement every day.

Personally, I distinguish between progress in quantity and quality of work. This applies to any field, not just kendo in my case. For example, when I work on post-processing images from a large photoshoot, simply reducing the number of photos in the pipeline is not sufficiently satisfactory for me as a measure of progress. I try to develop new processing techniques and make mental notes about composition and camera settings for future shoots. This way, working on the particular shoot has the benefit of leaving me with improved skills, even in the worst case scenario, say, if the images themselves would never be looked at by the clients ever again.

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The preferred weapon

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Last Sunday, I had an excuse to put away my Sony a7R II, which I have been using almost exclusively for the last year, and to spend some time with my old Canon 1DX. Armando and I were covering the Cross-country National Championship at the Beacon Hill park. It was an intense day, both i terms of the race itself and in terms of shooting. Everybody hoped in vain that the cold, pouring rain that started just as the athletes began their warm-up runs would stop before the race. Instead, it continued on and off throughout the day.

On the positive side, rain makes action photos more interesting, at least for sports like running, soccer and rugby. I like how the fast shutter speed (I was shooting at 1/1000 s most of the time) freezes the out-of-focus rain drops between the subject and the camera.

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The cold rain is tough on the hardware, though, not to mention the athletes and the photographers. For example, I could not shoot with the Sony as much as I wanted to – it is not weather-proof enough.

The bulletproof feel of the 1DX, the autofocus speed, the framing rate, even the characteristic shutter sound of the high-speed bursts – these are the things I’ve been missing in my mirrorless camera. About the sound of 1Dx – I can recognize it in the crowd of photographers even on TV. It reminds me of an episode from “Heartbreak Ridge”, when Clint Eastwood’s character says to young marines: “This is the AK-47 assault rifle, the preferred weapon of your enemy, and it makes a very distinctive sound when fired at you, so remember it.”

For the rainy days, my preferred weapon is definitely a Canon.

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Learning from the master

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This is a tree that I see from my office window. I snapped a picture of it with my phone and did the drawing afterwards on an iPad.

I have been learning to draw from my six-year-old daughter. Not the technique per se, but to enjoy the drawing process itself. Children are masters of having fun, and my daughter’s drawing is a perfect example. She enjoys it so much that she goes right to her desk when she comes home, without even changing out of her school clothes. It doesn’t bother her at all that she might not have time to finish the picture, that she might get interrupted halfway through her project by us calling her to have dinner. In fact, she probably doesn’t view drawing in terms of projects at all. It is simply something to enjoy at the moment.

I find that emulating this attitude is not as easy at it sounds. The barriers that keep me from doing it are entirely imaginary. For example, when I was on sabbatical, I found time to sketch almost on a daily basis. I enjoyed it a lot and thought that it was a great exercise for developing observation skills. Now, when I am firmly back to my daily routine, I objectively don’t have any less time for sketching. In fact, I have even more opportunities – all my art supplies are right here in my house. Yet, somehow I hesitate to start something that I might not be able to finish, even though there is no external pressure to complete “the project” whatsoever.

So I am learning this child-like attitude from my daughter – taking action for the fun of it and not worrying about the result.

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Cookie-cutter projects

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Over the long weekend, my daughter and I finally finished the soapstone carving project that we started almost a year ago. We bought a kit that contained a block of stone cut out in a rough shape of an orca. It looked exactly as if it was done with a cookie-cutter. In fact, it was made by hand using a scroll saw. We talked to the sculptor, who made these kits. He said that it took he quite a bit of trial and error to find the right dimensions of the cutout. But once it was done, it was matter of rounding the edges and smoothing the surface to produce a rather neat carved figure of an orca. The success was practically guaranteed, and a 6-7 year-old kid could produce a carving in a matter of hours.

In our defence, the reason it took us so long was that we had to leave the figure unfinished while we went to Europe for most of the year. All that was left to be done was to wax and buff the surface. We used a hair dryer to heat the stone orca (it became so hot that I had to hold it with a towel!) and rubbed it with a piece of wax, which was also in the kit. When the stone cooled down, we buffed the surface with a piece of cloth.

I wonder if it is the key to a successful and enjoyable creative project for beginners in any field: having the most time-consuming part pre-completed (e.g. providing a pre-cut rough shape of a statue with correct proportions), while leaving some room for creativity in terms of small details and finishing touches.

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This principle worked in a similar way, when my wife and daughter baked chocolate muffins to celebrate our daughter’s birthday at school. Both enjoyed the baking, largely because they used a store-bought mix for the dough.

Probably, this idea of having the hard work done is behind the enduring popularity of colouring books. After all, the outline is already there, with the proportions and the composition taken care of. All that is left is to have fun colouring the details.

University students sometimes complain that the projects they are doing in the labs are “cookie-cutter experiments”, meaning that the outcomes are predetermined, and there is no element of scientific discovery in their work. Perhaps, the instructors, who design the projects, need to find a balance between guiding the students by having some of the preliminary work done beforehand, but allowing enough uncertainty in the remaining process to enable sometimes-surprising results.

Then again, at some point someone would have to learn how to do the entire project from scratch, starting from the metaphorical rough piece of stone and finishing with a polished sculpture. There is a great pleasure in creating your own paintings instead of colouring within the lines all the time.

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Shooting Raptors

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Last two days, I was shooting basketball games at our university.

Toronto Raptors, the only Canadian NBA team, had a training camp at our university last week. At the end, they had an inter-squad game and I had an opportunity to shoot photos of it.

The NBA training camp was a big event for our university’s athletics department and, arguably, for our entire town. The Raptors media unit had their procedures worked out in minute details, and they conveyed a message that we, as photographers, were privileged to have access to the players. I fully realize that this was, indeed, the case, considering that the tickets for the only publicly-accessible game were sold out in a matter of minutes. I came to the athletic centre an hour before the game, and the was already a line of lucky ticket holders stretching around the building.

The instructions for photographers were exceptionally detailed. They specified everything from the designated area beside the court (a square of approximately 1 m x 1 m marked by a tape on the floor) to how we were supposed to sit in it (cross-legged, with cameras on our bodies or behind us) to the periods during the game when we were allowed to leave the box.

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I believe the hype leading to the event played a large role in creating a positive experience for the spectators and the local media people. The game itself was a bit disappointing, because it obviously lacked the competitive aspect. The pace was quite slow. Despite having almost no breaks, most of the players literally didn’t break a sweat by the end of the game. Of course, this is also due to their impressive physical condition. There were a couple of episodes, when some players showed the speed they were capable of by sprinting across the court. I missed some shots of these moments because I simply could not react fast enough to keep these guys in the frame. Only during these rare bursts of speed could I hear the rapid squeaking of the sneakers on the floor that is so characteristics of basketball matches.

Yesterday’s opening game of our university’s men’s basketball season was a complete opposite in terms of the energy of the players. It was fast and exciting. It was a real completion, which is what basketball is about after all.

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Both the professional and the student games were fun to shoot, though. It was my first time shooting sports with a mirrorless Sony a7R II instead of a Canon EOS-1DX DSLR. I took the Sony with me on sabbatical trip, and I have gotten used to its higher resolution, larger dynamic range and advanced focus tracking features. Of course, the autofocus on the a7R II is not as fast as it is on 1Dx and the faming rate is not as high. On the balance, though, I find that the Sony produced nicer images.

I shot compressed RAW files, which allowed practically the same level of flexibility in post-processing as RAW, but did not fill the buffer during continuous shooting nearly as fast.

Another useful setting that I learned from Armando, my associate, who has been shooting sports with a7R II during entire last season, is the focus area – Lock-on AF: Flexible spot L. Combined with the continuous AF setting, it makes the camera focus on the object in the centre of the frame and then track it as long the shutter button remains half-pressed. It is just a joy to use for sports. An important note is that tracking features like this (and also eye detection, which is fantastic for portraits) work only with native Sony lenses. Using my Canon lenses on a Metabones adapter is a bit frustrating, because it feels like I am missing the best part of the mirrorless experience.

For these two basketball games, I shot mostly with my new Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens, which I used for the first time during my latest trip to Japan.

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Too present to learn

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“You can’t think and hit at the same time.”

– Yogi Berra

I wonder, wouldn’t it be super-productive to apply my analytical skills to learning a physical skill? For example, I could use a fundamental studying technique like note-taking for learning kendo or violin-playing.

However, this is obvious and easy only in principle. In reality, I find that practicing a martial art or music requires so much focus and present-moment awareness that I literally remember very little to take notes of after practice. All my energy, both physical and mental, is spent on doing the thing, not on thinking about it. In fact, I am surprised how some people can ask questions during a kendo practice. Not that that find the answers obvious (mostly, quite the opposite) or the behaviour awkward (even though the structure of a typical kendo practice is not conducive to question-and-answer sessions, we are not in Japan after all). I just don’t find that beyond the very basic level, intellectual understanding of a particular technique is helpful for making progress. It feels like practice is needed at the moment, not another explanation.

I recently came upon a similar reflection in a book I’ve been reading, “A Man in Love” by Karl Ove Knausgaard (which is a fantastic book, by the way – I can’t say that I enjoy any particular aspect of it, and the story is not exciting, but somehow I just know it’s a modern masterpiece, and I cannot stop reading it). There, a writer friend of the main character describes his experience of writing about and training with professional boxers: “You know, the boxers I wrote about had an incredible presence. But that meant they weren’t spectators of themselves, so they didn’t remember anything. Not a thing! Share the moment with me here and now. That was their offer.”

Having said all this, I think there is a way of harnessing the power of analysis. In fact, this is how progress usually happens – at the juncture of previously disjointed fields. Just look at Bruce Lee’s notebooks with all the detailed sketches and notes on the physical, psychological and philosophical aspects of his practice. I think the idea is to separate the two activities in time. Practice first, analyze later. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you cannot think while hitting, but you can think about how you’ve just hit.

In fact, I was probably wrong, when I said that couldn’t remember anything about the last night’s practice. After all, there are established techniques for helping me remember, to improve my ability to remember:

  • Verbalize the learned concep. If I learned only one thing during last practice, what is that? Assigning words to the idea captures it and gives it some substance. Now it can be studied and analyzed.
  • Do this soon after practice (within the first 24 hours). Make a written note of what you learn.
  • Revisit the note before the next lesson, so you can build upon what you’ve learned during the practice.

In the case of violin practice, things are even simpler – my teacher takes notes while I practice and gives them to me after the lesson.

All these suggestions sound incredibly simple and obvious. This is what we teach our students, who study math, physics and engineering.

Obvious – definitely. Simple? I find them easier said than done. But if nothing else, learning this way is a practice itself.

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Violin lessons

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When I was taking photos of famous Italian violins at the Sforza Castle museum in Milan a few months ago, I did not imagine that very soon I would begin my first violin lessons to keep a company for my six-years-old daughter. These are the first formal music lessons of any kind for both of us, I might add!

So here are my first impressions of learning violin.

The initial stage of learning the most basic fundamentals of this highly technical skill, which is completely foreign to me (that is, I cannot draw upon my experience in any other field) is incredibly rewarding. Immediately, after the very few first attempts to extract a clear sound, I have a completely new level of appreciation of classical music that opened to me. If before, when I heard some virtuoso play a violin concerto, I would think: “This must be incredibly difficult.” Now I have a first-hand sense of what specifically is so difficult and how many of these tremendously difficult aspects must align perfectly for the music to appear that fluid. It’s a different world from what I could imagine!

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Also, it was nice to hear my teacher draw an analogy between violin-playing and martial arts in that the essence of practice in both areas is to focus on the form. If the form is executed flawlessly, the result is automatically beautiful.

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Creating disfluency

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“The best lessons are those that force us to do something and to manipulate information “
— Charles Duhigg “Smarter Faster Better“

One of my favorite jokes is about a teacher, who complains about how incapable of learning his students are: “I explained it once,” he said, “- they didn’t understand. I explained twice – they still did not understand. I explained for the third time – I finally understood it, but they still didn’t!”

This week, I tried to recreate this effect for myself. I taught a short PhD course at my host university here in Milan, and, being a visiting professor, I had a lot of freedom in choosing the content and the format of the course.

Generally, I believe that academic teaching and research are best done with some synergy between them. In other words, one can benefit the other. In practice, though, I think that usually my research experience positively influences my teaching, but the opposite feedback is indirect at best.

This time, I wanted to take advantage of the fact there were only a few graduate students in the class, who were already well on their way to becoming capable researchers. So I decided to completely re-work the way I usually present the fundamental concepts in my research area (which is aeroacouctics – I study how fluid flows generate sound). The course preparation took a lot of time, but in retrospect, forcing myself to manipulate the information that I was already familiar with helped me crystallize the image of the state-of-the-art, not only for the students, but for myself too, and define the “adjacent possible” – the area just beyond the cutting edge of the research field, where we will focus our next efforts.

The reason for this is that deliberately re-arranging the information makes it disfluent – more difficult to deal with initially (e.g. I cannot jump straight to conclusions, because I am familiar with the field.) It has been shown in various fields that engaging with information, manipulating it, makes it “sticky” in the long term. It transforms information into knowledge.

I think that is why practice is so important in any field, from research to kendo to photography. It is not enough to have read about integration by parts or suriage waza or motion blur. We need to do the techniques time and time again to understand them and “make them our own”.

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A new orbit

I have overheard an expression regarding a sphere of someone’s interests: “being pulled into a new orbit,” which I think is a near-perfect analogy of how our children expand our horizons. It resonated with my own experience, and I was compelled to draw this cartoon to illustrate it.

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The analogy goes like this: when you don’t have children, you have a familiar sphere of interests, which develops under various influences throughout your life. If you were a planet, this would be your personal orbit, shaped by your parents, friends, teachers, and other “celestial bodies”.

Then, a major cosmic event occurs, and you have a child. Paraphrasing Neil Armstrong, it might be a small step for mankind, but a giant leap for a man (or a woman).

At first, this child is like your satellite. Her life revolves around yours. But as she grows, her interests and inclinations shape what you are interested in as well. You are being pulled out of your orbit. This implies a certain level of instability, so it can feel unnerving and uncomfortable. But even if you don’t settle into a new (wider and more exciting) orbit and instead get slingshot into the space, think about the alternative – going around and around along a familiar path year after year. So have no worries and enjoy the ride. Maybe that is the reason we have kids – so they can shake our universe apart.

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Here is my personal example. I studied art as a child, and have been painting occasionally in my adult years, in addition to doing photography. I think that might have affected my daughter’s early interest in art. Now, next to her, my own sphere of artistic interests is expanding. We now sketch and paint together regularly, and I even took a sculpture class last fall – my first art class since the high-school years. Isn’t it wild? I think it is.

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Is multitasking avoidable?

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One of the tactics for productive writing (academic and other kinds) is separating the tasks of generating content and editing it. We commonly suggest to students to “write to a deadline” (even and artificial, self-imposed one) and then take time editing the article. John Irving said, “Rewriting is what I do best as a writer. I spend more time revising a novel or screenplay than I take to write the first draft.”

I am wondering is a similar principle can be applied to photography. Wouldn’t it be nice not to worry about exposure, colours, noise, even composition, during a photo shoot and only focus on capturing the moment or the model’s expression? Theoretically, everything except capturing the action can be delegated to the post-processing stage.

To some degree, we already do this in sports photography, where action is arguably more important than image quality. But this is only partially true. In fact, image quality is what separates great photos (even in sports) from mediocre ones. Image quality has many components: composition, subject isolation (from the background), sharpness, exposure, colour balance, noise level, etc. Some of these aspects, like sharpness and composition, have to be taking care of at the time of shooting, at least with the currently available hardware and software. Other aspects, like choice of equipment, shooting angles, need to be addressed even earlier.

Photography is, fundamentally, capturing the light, and if it is not done (mostly) right, there won’t be another opportunity to do it. Even with staged shoots, it is never possible to “enter the same river twice,” figuratively speaking.

In research, we tell the students that an experiment is only valid if it is repeatable, but I wonder if this is ever the case if we consider the physical phenomenon in its entire complexity and not a subset of conditions that constitute the model or hypothesis being tested.

UVPCS Christmas Cracker swimming competition. December 7, 2013 (apshutter.com)