Peter Oshkai photography

October 14, 2015October 14, 2015

Technique vs content

There is a saying that in order to be a good writer, one needs to live an interesting life. I am not sure to whom to attribute this quote, but I came across similar advice to new professors: the key to having research papers accepted to peer-reviewed journals is to have something new to say in them.

This argument comes back to the dilemma that many professional photographers face – whether to specialize in a niche genre/subject or to explore various areas. Specialization allows us to hone the technique, but ultimately, it is the interesting content that makes a unique image.

Very likely, this is true in any creative endeavour: in the end, the substance always trumps the technique. It is true that the technique, the craft, the skill are important. Without them, our ability to deliver the content, to communicate it to the audience, would be limited. Still, it is a common misconception of dilettantes, in photography or other art, that it is the lack of technique, the equipment, etc. that prevents them from creating masterpieces. Tolstoy describes this in “Anna Karenina,” when Vronsky pursues painting out of boredom, armed with knowledge, but lacking commitment.

According to Steven Pressfield, commitment, particularly commitment to showing up and working on a daily basis is the key to generating great content. The skill development takes care of itself – the quantity of practice eventually transforms into quality.

October 6, 2015October 6, 2015

Discipline = freedom

I am continually amazed how well the concepts from martial arts, including tactics, training and teaching methods, etc., apply to other areas of life. Perhaps, with military training, the stakes are so high that the techniques evolved to crystallize the most fundamental and universally-applicable principles.

One of these principles is summarized in a maxim “Discipline equals freedom.” This might seem counter-intuitive at the first glance, but I find it is perfectly applicable to photography, where discipline comes up at several levels, from continuing practice and developing the shooting and post-processing skills to carefully and methodically packing the gear when going to a shoot to systematically experimenting with various camera and lighting settings during the shoot itself. The freedom then literally means creative freedom. When all the logistics and methodology is taken care of in a very disciplined inner, our full mental capacity, the entire bandwidth, is available for processing the incoming information, which allows us to react to changing conditions and opportunities during the shoot and to recognize potentially interesting patterns and combinations of lighting, composition, posing (in the case of portraits) and even future ways of using or displaying the images.

in other words, discipline allows us to reserve creativity for things that truly require it.

October 5, 2015October 5, 2015

Sports photography: pushing the shutter speed limit

Freezing the motion while shooting an indoor sport like basketball requires a high shutter speed. I used to shoot at around 1/1000 sec with an 1/2.8 lens on my Canon 1D X camera body. The indoor games are usually poorly lit, so the ISO (and the associated noise) increases significantly as the shutter speed increases (the exposure time decreases). Thankfully, the 1D X has excellent low-light performance. Besides, noise in a sport photo is more acceptable than in a landscape, for example.

Stil, there is a continuous pursuit of cleaner ad crispier images, so I have been experimenting with pushing the lower limit of the shutter speed to see when the motion blur would become unacceptable. What is acceptable is somewhat subjective, but in this case, I would like to have start images of the athletes’ faces, while allowing some motion blur in the other parts of their bodies (which actually enhances the visual impact of the photo). Also, I want to have a reasonable success rate of this kind of images. Every now and then, it is possible to capture a sharp photo even at 1/200 sec or so (I have done it by accident), but this happens purely by luck and shooting at such a low shutter speed would not be practical from a professional standpoint.

I found that with longer focal lengths (e.g. shooting with a 70 – 200 mm f/2.8 L IS), the sutter speed of 1/640 sec is a limit, while with a wider lens (e.g. a 35 mm f/1.4 L), I could shoot as slow as 1/500 sec. The difference is due to the shallower depth of field (DOF) of the longer lens (at the same f-number). Actually, the shallow DOF is highly desirable, as it allows to visually separate the subject from the background.

My general conclusion is that it is a good idea to vary the shutter speed (in the range of 1/500 – 1/1000 sec), as well as the lenses, in the course of the game. I would start with the long lens and fast shutter speed to make sure that I capture some “keeper” images and than try other lens/settings combinations in the hope to capture some more unique shots.

September 28, 2015September 28, 2015

1,000,000 suburi

Certain goals (well, most goals worth striving for) cannot be achieved by forcing our way towards them in one huge burst of effort. Instead, they require consistent, daily practice over a long period of time. In kendo, for example, as in many disciplines rooted in Zen Buddhism, performing 1 million sword swings (suburi) is said to lead to divine level of understanding of the Way of the Sword. The number 1,000,000 has some special place in Buddhism. For example, reciting a sutra 1,000,000 times would lead to enlightenment (or so they say). The point is, it is not enough to understand the technique mentally; one must truly make it a part of daily life.

From this viewpoint, it becomes clear why many teachers value “stick-to-it-iveness” over talent in their students. It is one thing to grasp the basics quickly due to one’s natural abilities and it is another thing altogether to have dedication to show up for practice on the daily basis. Great changes happen by evolution, not revolution…

Of course, the showing up aspect becomes easier, at least at some basic level, as time goes by, because the practise becomes a habit. In other words, it becomes easier to practice than not to practice. That is why it is important to set yourself up for success initially, to make it impossible to fail during the first weeks that are crucial to habit-forming. For example, do not commit to doing thousands or even hundreds suburi, pushups, fill-the-blank’s, etc.; do just 5 or 10 (surely you can spare 30 seconds out of even the busiest day!), but do it every day, without exceptions, and do it first thing after waking up, so that there is no possibility of postponing it until tomorrow.

Digging a bit deeper, however, things become more complicated. Suppose, the habit of practicing has been formed and we are cranking out the reps on the daily basis. This is where the practice becomes automatic, mechanical, and thus loses its quality. A high-level kendo sensei once pointed out a fact that sounded like a truism: factors that lead to success are (a) quantity of practice and (b) quality of practice.

Still, there is something inherently fascinating about the transforming effects of daily practice. Perhaps, this is why sharing workout logs with the numbers of accumulated pushups, miles, steps, etc. are so popular in the social media, and so are the “365 photos” projects, where photographers take and share a photo every day for one year.

With the photography or blogging projects in particular, the inevitable (but, hopefully temporary) drop in quality is obvious not only to the author, but also to the audience – things are no longer interesting when the novelty wears away. I think that this is the point where it is important to slow down and to bring the quality back into focus, while still showing up for practice every day. This means that the 1,000,000 suburi mark, “where the sword rips trough the space like silk” (or The Force becomes our ally), is not going to be reached in a couple of years, and 365 pictures will likely not make us drastically better photographers. In my case, I will report back in about 20 years whether the one-million’s cut was any different from the first…

September 24, 2015

Reticular activation

Recently, I listened to Tim Ferriss’ interview with Scott Adams, who is famous for creation of the Dilbert cartoon. He spoke, with great humour, about the power of positive affirmations (e.g. writing “I will become a famous cartoonist” 15 times a day, every day). Interestingly, the appeal of this technique has something to do with reticular activation system in the brain, which controls transitions between sleeping and awake states, and also between periods of low and high attention.

Hypothetically, we might have filtering mechanisms in our brains that only let relevant information through, while classifying most of the information that comes our way as noise. Examples of this effect include noticing many cars similar to yours after you’ve just bought a new car, recognizing your name spoken in a noisy crowd, etc.

Similarly, we have a tendency to respond to emotionally-charged words, compared to emotionally-neutral ones of similar meaning (e.g. “to yank” is inherently funnier to post people than “to pull”). This gives the writers a particular technique, where they can purposely choose to replace a logically-correct words in their manuscripts with words that have similar (but necessarily identical) meaning, but which have a better potential to engage readers on the emotional level.

Perhaps, photographers can also be conscious about choosing post-processing techniques, for example, that would appeal to the viewers’ emotions (e.g. enhance grain, etc.) even at the expense of decreasing the “quality” of an image in terms of sharpness, exposure, etc.

September 19, 2015September 19, 2015

On relaxation and tension

In kendo, when we initiate an attack and approach the opponent during seme-ai, we are advised by wise senseis to not only maintain a relaxed grip on the shine, but to relax it even more as we apply pressure (metaphorically, speaking, of course, not really in terms of force per unit area) on the opponent. This is done to preemptively compensate for our natural tendency to tighten up at the beginning of the actual physical attack.

Tightening up is a natural reaction of the human body to physical stress. In fact, by consciously flexing our gip on a dumbbell, for example, we are able to pull off a couple of additional biceps curls beyond what would other wise be our maximum number of reps. This very effective principle, among others, is taught by Pavel Tsatsulin, who use to train special forces operators in various countries. According to him, strength requires tension, while flexibility requires relaxation. Ability to switch from one to another quickly and at will is the key to high physical performance.

I was going to make an analogy between this preemptive relaxation that is used to prepare a martial artist for the moment of tension and a creative process like painting or photography, but the specifics of this would-be analogy seem to be a bit far-fetched now as I think about it. If I always take too many shots during a typical basketball game, which makes the culling process long and tedious, should I preemptively compensate my trying to take photos only when the action comes closer, for example?.. As Richard Feynman said about analogies, it is possible to draw one between any two subjects, and therefore, the analogies are largely meaningless.

September 14, 2015

On strategy

Just as most people think that they are better-than-average drivers, majority of us think that we are better at strategy (e.g. business, sports, politics, etc.) than most of the others. Obviously, this cannot be true. Besides, there is one interesting limitation of being an expert strategist in a particular activity (e.g. basketball), which prevents this expertise from easily transferring to generalized strategy. Specific activities, particularly sports, have a defined set of rules. Learning and practicing to operate and within these rules makes one an expert, but not necessarily a strategist. True strategy implies ability (indeed, a skill) to quickly adapt to the new reality if some of the rules suddenly change or the new ones are added to the original ones.

This is another argument to striving to continuously reinvent oneself in any creative activity. Doing so allows us to practice strategy in the general sense – developing a skill of quickly formulating a model of the operating conditions (the ever-changing reality) from limited observations of those around us. In martial arts, this happens in a very explicit and direct way – by practicing your skill agains different opponents of various ages, body types, experience, skill and ability levels. In other areas, the analogy is more subtle, but it is there. As Richard Feynman put it in his famous interview “The pleasure of finding things out”, the scientific discovery (which is another example of a creative activity) is similar to watching a chess game and trying to figure out the rules. The trick is that we are allowed to see only a part of the board and only from time to time.

September 5, 2015

Start of the season

The start of our university’s sports season, and my first photoshoot of the season, happened under ideal conditions, photographically speaking. The women’s soccer game that I was shooting took place in the late afternoon, so the lighting was ideal – bright enough to keep the ISO low and diffuser enough to make the shadows soft. I had sufficient time to shoot and process the photos without any rush, because the academic year, with its own obligations has not started yet.

To add to the nice experience, my family was there to watch the game while I was shooting. Everybody enjoyed the event, even though our team lost.

September 3, 2015

Deconstructing the process: analytical approach to photography

A very practical, strategy-based way of looking at processes or problems is to start with the desired outcome and identifying the key conditions that need to be satisfied to make it happen. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, refers to these conditions as “moving variables”. The actual problem-solving then reduces to propagating these moving variables to the present moment, to the level of the next action (in GTD terms).

It is easy to see how this deconstruction of the problem can be applied in academic research, and particularly in the business-like aspects aspects of it, such as grant applications, for example. In martial arts, the connection is even more obvious. After all, the business strategy principles often originated in martial arts, Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” being the stereotypical example of a strategy guide for a modern person.

I think that in photography, this approach could also be very useful, and not only in the business aspects, but in the creative process itself, where approaching it from the starting point of the desired outcome can streamline the workflow and add efficiency by eliminating irrelevant factors and variables. Perhaps, applying this kind of analytical edge could be one way of differentiating ourselves in the sea of aspiring professional and insanely-serious amateur photographers (to borrow a term from Dan Heller).

September 2, 2015

Painting

Painting can be a very effective excersize for facilitating creative decision-making. Robert Rodriguez, a movie director and an accomplished artist, mentioned in a recent interview that he used to make actors paint on the movie set between their filming sessions. The idea is that making creative decisions related to colour choice, composition, etc. are fundamentally more challenging than trivial details that people are often obsessed about in their everyday situations (e.g. props or makeup/wardrobe/lighting issues on a movie set, for which there are often very efficient workarounds that are not even worth fussing about.)

Followed this example, I decided to paint for an hour or so alongside my four-year-old daughter, using a photo of flowers in the courtyard of the Sforza Castle in Milan that I took earlier this year. It was certainly fun to paint together with my daughter, and I am amazed at how quickly she is growing up and delighted to be able to share this time with her. In this sense at least, painting definitely puts things in the right perspective for me.

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