Workflow – Page 7 – Peter Oshkai photography

January 24, 2015January 24, 2015

Morning routine

There is a ton of literature and online resources that teach about effectiveness of consistent morning routines. Many authors, including Tim Ferriss, who wrote “The 4-Hour Body“, point out that it is just as important to break the routines up from time to time to avoid burnout. For example, Tim said that the exercise done for results (strength, endurance, flexibility) is most effective when done consistently, i.e. without much change day-to-day, but recreational activities a best (read: more fun) when they are varied.

I have been incorporating walking into my morning exercise. A couple of weeks ago, I took a decidedly un-urban route to the top of the Mt. Doug. Today, in the spirit of changing things up, I took a short walk through our neighborhood and am typing these words on my phone in a local Starbucks. (No, it is not in Paris, despite the photo above…)

I think that mixing things up every now and then is ultimately good for any activity (I am thinking research and photography in particular). It is allowing myself to do it without potentially sacrificing efficiency in the short term that is challenging.

January 22, 2015January 22, 2015

First-order access

There are many online and printed resources for organizing tools for any project and decluttering your home, but I find one concept, used by the host of the “MythBusters” show Adam Savage, very important. It is referred to as first-order access and basically means not storing anything behind anything else. In other words, anything in a workshop, a kitchen, an office, a library or a photo studio should be within direct reach and not hidden or obstructed by other stuff.

I find this principle particularly important during a photo shoot. Often, situations arise that force me to deviate from the original plan for the shoot. Having all my gear neatly organized, so that any lens, flash or cable can be accessed directly, without having to unload other items from the camera bag is very important. It allows me to use unforeseen challenges as opportunities to try new creative techniques, instead of spending valuable time on searching for gear.

I should mention that it is equally (and perhaps more) important not to have too much stuff in the first place, which, of course, is the basic principle of decluttering. Having too many choices of photo gear that can potentially be used to take a given shot robs you creative energy that is best applied to making decisions regarding lighting, composition, posing and other creative elements of the photo. Not specifically related to photography, “It’s All Too Much” by Peter Walsh is a highly-regarded reference on organization.

In general, when problems arise, it is important to come up with a constructive solution on the spot. It may not be the optimal solution, but the immediate timing of offering a solution cultivates the mindset of treating setbacks into learning experiences, instead of reasons for complaining.

January 18, 2015January 18, 2015

Need for self-expression

Many writers commented of the benefits of writing a journal and otherwise making writing a part of their daily routine. Besides increasing their productivity, developing writing skills and other obvious benefits, regular self-expression has a deeper underlying reason. As Kevin Kelly, an amazingly prolific author on the subject of technology, explained in an interview that I heard recently, it is not that we have something to say, and then we write about it. We write in order to find out what we have to say. In other words, we formulate our thoughts by writing them down.

A good example for this is academic research, where communicating the results through published articles is an integral part of the process. When I work with graduate students on a new project, we start outlining a future journal paper before starting the experiments that would eventually form its core. Doing so helps us define the focus as we work.

In a similar way, photography helps me appreciate the subject, whether it is a location, a building, a person or an event. Often, I do not have a particularly clear idea of what it was that attracted me to the subject to begin with, but by photographing it, I am able to find out its unique features. Just as writing (whether creative or technical), photography is a way of expressing our understanding of the subject. This very process crystallizes the intuitive aspects of understanding, ultimately deepening our knowledge. I think that more often than not, the author benefits from the process more than the audience does from the resulting work.

January 17, 2015January 17, 2015

Meaning of life

Recently, I came upon an interview with Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine, who wrote, among other books, “Cool Tools“, a review of the best or unique tools for nearly any kind of job. In the interview, he shared some interesting thoughts about the dilemma between choosing a niche for your activities to optimize performance, and being a generalist, i.e. exploring a wide range of activities. By the way, this appears to be true dilemma, as there is no correct choice.

In photography, as in other activities, e.g. academic research, specializing on an area of strength has many advantages. However, if your personal domain of activity is limited, narrow specialization potentially gets you stuck on a local maximum of performance. Achieving a global maximum requires one to go down on the performance curve. In other words, we need to become beginners in order to ultimately become better in something new.

Kelly talks about a concept of finding not just what you are good at, but what only you are good at. Searching for this global maximum of performance is very difficult as it necessarily involves ups and downs of performance. In fact, it can take an entire lifetime. Perhaps, this process of figuring out is the purpose of life.

January 16, 2015January 16, 2015

On leadership

Recently, I have been listening to a podcast about military strategy and tactics of Mongols during the Genghis Khan’s campaigns. It is interesting that the Mongols valued leadership abilities of their commanders very highly. For example, there is a quote sometimes attributed to Genghis Khan (although it is more likely a variation of a quote of Alexander the Great or the Socrates) that “an army of donkeys led by a lion is better an army of lions led by a donkey.”

The basic principles of leadership certainly transcend military applications and apply to many aspects of life. After all, most of what we do day-to-day is communicate with other people. There is a vast amount of literature written about it, perhaps, Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War” being the best known example of military strategy guidelines becoming a famous reference for business people.

For me personally, working with a research group of colleagues and graduate students, teaching a course or taking photos of people – all these activities involve leading or directing others. There are many details of leadership that are specific to a particular activity, but some key aspects are common. Here they are, taking a typical portrait photo shoot as an example:

Planning. This is foundation of a successful project. I need to have a clear idea of what I want to accomplish, what gear I would need, how much time the shoot would take, etc. However, there is a point of diminishing returns in planing, so at some point, it is important to just start doing things.
Flexibility. It is likely that things would not go exactly according to the plan. When that happens, I try to trust my experience and intuition and not over-think the choice of lens or camera settings, for example.
Confidence. I believe that planning and experience are the foundation of confidence, and flexibility is the result of it. Perhaps, it depends on the type of personality, but I think confidence should come naturally, not as a result of artificial effort. After all, it is really impossible to convincingly fake it, and also, there is a fine line between confidence and arrogance.
Communication. It is a two-way process, and when I am in a leading role, I control how the communication occurs. As a photographer, I need be aware of how the photo shoot as it progresses and make sure that everyone knows the general plan, but has sufficient autonomy to make adjustments without waiting for specific directions. This usually happens naturally with models, assistants and other photographers, as we establish a relaxed, fun atmosphere. Also, as I wrote earlier, asking others for feedback during the shoot is a great way of establishing a connection and avoiding mistakes.

January 14, 2015January 14, 2015

Practice, failure and unlearning

Developing a skill requires consistent practice. This is common knowledge in martial arts, but it is definitely true in other areas of life. It is simply not enough to absorb new information; it is also necessary in internalize it by repeatedly tying the new skill. The role of failure in this trial process is debatable. Most people fail many times before succeeding, so it is comfortable to think that we learn from our failures. Also, it is clear that training has to be challenging to be effective. However, some argue that failure is over-rated. For example, Peter Thiel, the author of “Zero to One“, said that in the case of startup companies (which fail often), failures occur not because of a single reason, but because of a combination of multiple factors. This makes these failures difficult to analyze and to learn from. As he puts it, a failed business is always a tragedy.

Although practice is crucial for learning, at some point in the creative process, it is necessary to “unlearn” – to put aside one’s arsenal of learned techniques and allow the intuition to take over. During photo shoots, for example, there is often no time to think through the composition, the lighting, the posing, etc. as the action unfolds. At such times, I work on trusting my experience in selecting the appropriate combination of parameters without thinking about the details. In fact, it is practice that enables this to happen – I have seen and shot similar situations enough times that I know which techniques, gear and camera settings do and to not work. In fact, knowing what does not work is particularly important for spontaneous, intuitive shooting. That knowledge, in a sense, is a product of prior failures.

January 3, 2015January 5, 2015

On planning

I wrote earlier that working with other people is beneficial for the various projects, including photo shoots. The flip side of this is that the more people are involved, the higher the level of responsibility . As a consequence, more planning is needed in order for the project to succeed. In fact, the planning can become a project in itself.

I am preparing for the start of the new academic term, and planning for the course that I will be teaching has been consuming my time for the last couple of days. Actually, I like the planning stage and understand importance of teaching, but in my experience, there is a point of diminishing returns, beyond which more planning would not yield any substantial improvement in teaching (or, indeed, learning, from the students’ perspective). In fact, Richard Reis in “Tomorrow’s Professor” wrote that a common trait among top performing academics is the ability (and willingness) to be less than perfectly prepared for lectures and other components of their teaching. Doing so serves two purposes: it saves time for other activities, e.g. research (or, perhaps, kendo?), and it allows one to teach in a more natural, spontaneous manner, actually improving the quality of teaching.

Without over-analyzing this fact, I am going to take it as a~~n excuse~~ reason for putting the work away for tonight, even though “being perfectly prepared” is not even on the horizon at the moment.

December 30, 2014January 5, 2015

Importance of routine

“The lack of interruption in trains of thought may be the critical ingredient in an environment that enables creative flow.”
Ronald T. Kellogg, “The Psychology of Writing“

Establishing a habit of working in a certain physical environment and/or during a particular time of day can be very effective for maximizing performance, whatever the definition of that happens to be. Writers are famous for following rigid daily routines and odd rituals, but the underlying principles apply to any creative work or work that involves concentration and/or thinking, such as reading, academic research (which is mostly reading and technical writing), drawing/painting, practicing martial arts, etc.

I like how the rigid structure of a typical kendo practice, for example, serves to establish confidence in the teaching methods in the students of all levels. This routine is reinforced by reigi, good manners or etiquette, which is the first thing taught to beginners and which permeates the entire practice, from the the first bow upon entering the dojo to the last bow upon leaving it.

In other things that I do, the routine is not as rigid, but there is some structure, and I find that I depend on it more than I thought earlier. For example, in my research, I like to read technical papers during certain times of the day, and I try to reserve specific amounts of time for my own writing. I find that brief, regular sessions, a concept that I learned from “Tomorrow’s Professor” by Richard Reis, work well for me, but the lack of interruptions during these sessions is crucial.

Similarly, I find that attempting multitasking while doing photo editing does not work for me. Initially, I followed advice of some professional photographers, who claim that they can go through large amounts of photos in Lightroom while watching TV in the evening, for example. I found that doing so detracts from both activities for me, so that I neither enjoy the movie nor have fun editing the photos. Working on the photos becomes just that – work, and an otherwise good movie becomes a distraction.

Having said this, a routine can be a double-edged sword, which can lead to stagnation or even burnout. For me, a nice thing about the part-time nature of my photography is that I can experiment with different strategies of organizing my work without the confines and expectations (whether real or imagined) of a conventional working environment.

December 17, 2014December 17, 2014

On efficiency

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
Annie Dillard, “The Writing Life”

I have been spending substantial effort on optimizing my photography workflow. This primarily applies to post-processing, but the concept is also relevant to the overall process of creating an image – from planning to shooting/production to retouching. Having experimented with it, I think that sometimes it is important to consciously forego efficiency for the sake of exploring new ideas or perfecting particular techniques.

It seems that in most aspects of our lives, productivity became the etalon of success (or at least the main indicator for potential for success – whatever the definition of the latter may be). Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that efficiency often tramples presence – active intellectual and emotional engagement with the job at hand.

Drawing again a parallel with kendo, the Japanese Way of the Sword, I learned from a hachidan (8th dan) sensei that personal development requires a combination of quality and quantity of practice. To achieve quantity, certain degree of efficiency is absolutely necessary. After all, nobody has an infinite amount of time to devote to any single aspect of training. However, quality of practice requires presence. As I mentioned in the post about the learning process, we need to engage with the subject and make it own own.

In photography, the focus on efficiency is particularly prominent in high-volume shoots, where increasing the quantity of images offered to the clients is viewed as a way of boosting the overall sales. I would argue that this approach does not necessarily lead to the long-term development of a creative photographer. Personally, I have been working on consciously reducing the number of shots I take in a given photo session. This is not to say that I change my shooting style to the one of the days of analogue film. I just try to think ahead of what I want to capture before firing off a high-speed burst from my 1D X. In post-processing, having a limited (read: manageable) number of images to start with frees up time, which allows me to have fun with the photos by trying new techniques, thinking about what works for a particular type of shot in terms of composition, lighting, etc.

I believe that quantity of practice for photographers comes from consistency – regularly shooting new projects, either for clients or for personal interest and fun. Quality, on the other hand, is achieved by allowing ourselves to sacrifice some efficiency for presence, i.e. engagement with the subject and the process of creating the image.

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014

Time management for photo projects

Sometimes, when a photo shoot results in a couple of thousands images that need to be sorted through, post-processed and deliver to the client, time management becomes an issue. For me, photography is a part-time pursuit, so finding time to move the large projects along is an issue, which I continuously deal with. Lately, I found it effective to adopt an approach that I’ve been using in my work as a professor – working in brief regular sessions.

This concept applies to so-called “deep work” – something that needs to be done and is fundamentally important (such as doing research and reading technical literature), but that is not urgent and “in your face” (such as answering email and attending meetings). I first learned about it from a book called “Tomorrow’s Professor: Preparing for Careers in Science and Engineering” by Richard M. Reis. He describes that people, who are productive academically (read: publish many research papers) trend to work in brief, regular sessions. There is nothing surprising in this (it’s kind of eating an elephant one bite at a time), but in Reis’ observation, both words “brief” and “regular” are important. Brief work periods help avoiding burnout, and regular sessions ensure that progress is being made (otherwise, lots of time would be wasted to re-start the project at the beginning of every session).

For my photo projects, I try to adapt the same principle, particularly when some creative image editing is required. I work on a couple of images every day, as a way of taking a break from other tasks. This way, I can engage and have fun with the photos, and it doesn’t feel like work. After all, someone said that starting a photo business is a sure way to kill a perfect hobby, and I am determined to avoid that.

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