My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
Currently, I am contemplating a painting (not a digital one, but actual oils on canvas) in the style of The Group of Seven
I only briefly looked through the dance images, and believe that some of them are quite interesting. I am really looking forward to trying some new post-processing techniques on them, so the painting would have to wait for now.
Sometimes, it seems that the value of art is purely in its entertainment aspect. I believe that this is misleading, as art has a tremendous potential to educate us about universal principles that govern various fields, particularly about human nature, which plays a role in everything we do.
These days, we have to carefully manage consumption of information, which is conveniently and constantly available to us in various forms. Since our inbound bandwidth is limited, it may seem productive to limit the consumed information to that with immediately practical value, e.g. technical and non-fiction literature, documentary movies, reportage and scientific photos, etc. However, doing so would lead to missing the potential to expand our knowledge base beyond what is necessary to function on the daily basis within our current social and professional roles. In other words, focussing only on what is immediately and obviously useful does not provide an opportunity of significant, i.e. non-incremental, learning.
In teaching, relating the teacher’s personal experience with the material, including initial failures or struggles in learning it, is an important tool for establishing a working connection with the students. This is relevant to teaching in a general sense, not necessarily limited to the scope of academe. For example, in the context of photography, I find that showing some vulnerability by making it clear that I am in the process of learning the craft, helps avoid appearing as a know-it-all. Of course, this applies to interactions with other photographers, and not with clients or models, with whom projecting confidence in one’s skills is of paramount importance.
Some examples of good balance between vulnerability and helpfulness are writings of James Altucher, such as “The Power of No
Caucasian people stand of the crowd in Japan. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though. My wife and I have many interesting interactions with Japanese people, while we were in our tourist mode in Kyoto during my sabbatical five years ago.
Often, the children would also ask us to take a picture of them with the famous landmark in the background (and sometimes, posing together with one of us). Far from being a nuisance, these regular encounters with kids, with all their initial awkwardness, pride of having pushed the social barrier (taking to a gaijin) and delight at being understood, became a highlight of our trip to Kyoto.
In shodo (Japanese calligraphy), one of the most difficult aspects is the balance between the individual characters (kanji) and the overall image, which often contains many kanji. In the image above, the orange marks, made by my teacher, point out the individual kanji and, in the case of “water” in the lower left, the elements of the kanji.
This balance between the details and the whole is one of the parallels between shodo and kendo. It also translates to practically any other activity, such as teaching, studying and photography.
Stock photography is not often recommended by professional photographers as a single niche to focus on. One of the reasons is that stock images are aimed at a ver broad audience and therefore do not offer much opportunity for creative self-expression. In my experience, I find this to be true. In fact, I am often surprised that my most popular/successful stock photos are not the ones that I personally like. This make
I think the same principle applies to photography. Since most of the photos are distributed online, we can count on the vastness of the Internet that somewhere out there there are people “like us” in the sense that our favourite images would resonate with them as well. These people are similar to us to begin with (perhaps, in their tastes, background, interests, etc.), so they don’t need to be convinced about the value of photographs that are meaningful to us, as authors. Perhaps it is not surprising then that many Internet followings start with small groups of family and real-life friends and later expand to social media friends and so on.
Of course, it is impossible to consistently shoot only photos with great personal significance and emotional content. For the rest (I always think about photos of the Eiffel Tower or other famous landmarks taken from touristy viewpoints), stock photography market is a perfect outlet. After all, vanilla is the most popular flavour of ice cream (it is my personal favourite too, by the way).
My three-year-old daughter loves books. Some of her favourites are “Lost and Found
Couple of days ago, I came across Jeffers’ “Once Upon an Alphabet
Not being so presumptuous as to aim for “a giant leap for mankind” with my photographs, as an experiment, I will try to (a) look for subjects/themes that a child could relate to and (b) work more with negative space in my composition.
On a dark and cold Saturday morning, I walked to a local cafe only to find it closed – the guy, who was supposed to open it, did not show up. While my original motivation for these Saturday morning walks was to break my usual morning routine, in other words, to deliberately have no defined pans, it turned out that looking forward to a hot cappuccino is itself a plan. Not surprisingly, unmet expectations are not fun.
It is well known that fear of not meeting one’s expectations often prevents us from trying new things. It turns out, though, that the so-called “worst case scenario,” in many cases, is not that bad in the big scheme of things. In the trivial case of the closed cafe, for example, I ended up having a (probably better) cup of coffee at home together with my wife.
So, if one can deliberately experience poverty or shame, can the same be done with spontaneity? I don’t see why not. I think it would be quite useful to anticipate that at some point in a project things will not go according to plan, and anticipate that it would be necessary engage intuition and creativity to the maximum. In fact, I sometimes engineer these creative or technical challenges by imposing constraints on my photography workflow. …Ok, sometimes, I just don’t plan ahead well enough, so the challenges arise naturally. Still, I’d like to think that treating the challenges as opportunities for learning is what the stoics would do.
“You should not have a favorite weapon. To become over−familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well.”
– Miyamoto Musashi, “The Book of Five Rings
In my academic research, I am often faced with a choice of exploring a new subject or focussing deeper on my core area of expertise. It is the well-known dilemma of specializing versus generalizing. Professional photographers face the same question when they decide to niche down on a specific subject or remain generalists.
I think that being a professional photographer, but not investing your entire identity into it, paradoxically, makes you a better photographer in the long term. This is somewhat similar to budo, the way of the martial arts, following which on a certain (high) level requires exploring other human activities, learning about human nature and applying this knowledge to one’s core area of expertise. In fact, Minamoto Musashi, who stated the principles for following the Way of Strategy in his “Book of Five Rings
“The world is full of obvious things”
– Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Hound of the Baskervilles
I noticed a while ago, that many of my colleague in academia (most of them engineers or scientists) have strong personal interests in creative activities like art, photography, writing, etc. I have been wondering what aspects are common between the creative process and knowledge work, such as academic research. This question comes up every now and then in the discussions of whether artistic training is meaningful for people of other professions (I think there is an implicit assumption that is different parts of the rain are responsible for intuitive and logical thought processes, the two ways of thinking are not generally applicable to the same problems).
Of course, observation alone is not sufficient. The process of creating an object of art also involves communicating the information crystallized through observation to the audience. The skills of observation, processing of information (identifying key elements) and communicating it to others easily translate to academic work, or most other activities, for that matter. So I would like to think that my taking photos or practicing kendo indirectly benefits my research. This seems to work for many prominent colleagues, so I am sticking with it.
