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
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.
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 the other hand, subtle processing does not necessarily mean a small amount of it. In fact, as the digital technology continues to develop, I believe that the overall workflow will become more back-loaded, where creative decisions about composition, lighting, and perhaps even focus, will be done at the post-processing stage.
From my perspective, the new process was more rewarding than the conventional one, not in the financial sense, but in terms of improving the quality of the interaction with the students. The students were generally more appreciative of our work and seemed to enjoy seeing the inner works of the photo manipulation process.
What makes motion attractive is that it represents something impermanent. Even though the instant is frozen in a static image, the 
The inspiration for doing these experiments came partially from listening to an interview with Chase Jarvis, who talked about the importance of striving to be different, not just better, at photography as an art. This doesn’t mean to be different just for the sake of it or pursuing attention for the sake of attention. Instead, Jarvis talked about exploring the limits of combining the elements of other artists’ work (he referred to the work of 
” would recommend. In my case, the solution has been to drastically reduce the volume of the photos that I submit to the stock agencies. Doing so not only saves time overall, but encourages a more critical evaluation of the photos, as I select the ones that would be processed and submitted. The obvious drawback of this strategy from the purely business perspective is that some of the potential sales would not happen, because of the reduced volume of photos offered to potential customers. However, for someone like me, who does photography part-time and has already established a stock portfolio of reasonable size (few thousand images on sale), focussing on quality over quantity pays off in time savings alone.
I wrote earlier about my favourite 
The photo of the signal light in the fog (below) reminded me of the 
‘ paintings, so I wanted to play with it’s colours to create an image in that style. In Lightroom, I bumped up noise reduction sliders (both luminance and colour) to very high values, around 50. Of course, this results in significant loss os sharpness and detail, but just like the Impressionists, I was not concerned with these kinds of things. I also increased the saturation of the Blue, Red and Purple colour channels almost to the maximum.
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) at some point in the editing process. Having said this, time is a very precious resource, and while I am doing fine tweaks, which might not be noticed by anyone, except myself, I am not doing something else, for example, shooting more photos or learning new techniques. In my experience, the “optimal” stopping point in post-processing is actually not a true optimum, in the optimization theory sense of the word. Rather, it is a bit of a moving target. Finding the balance between under- and over-processed image is like riding a bicycle: sometimes, I lean more one way, sometimes – the other. The important thing is doing it consistently and avoiding extremes.