The Importance of Mastery

Posted on March 2, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Mastery is a complete and utter waste of time for most things.  Mastery takes enormous amounts of time and produces only marginal benefit over mere competence in an area.  When I was a kid, it took me a few hours to beat Donkey Kong, but it took me dozens of hours to find every secret, every glitch, every shortcut, and the fastest way to beat every level.  Did spending all those hours mastering Donkey Kong really benefit me?

I’ve talked about this Seth Godin post before, but I refer to it again for its relevant graphic:

Seth Godin's Skill v. Time GraphWe’d be better off if we only became minimally competent at the things we don’t do that often or aren’t that important to us, and poured that extra time into our core skills, that next skill or project that will make you more valuable, or something you really enjoy.

For example, I wanted to build a blog.  I know basic HTML, but I needed to learn some CSS, PHP and javascript to build what I wanted.  I spent about 10 hours doing so, and this blog now looks and functions reasonably well.  I thought about really diving into web coding stuff, but I stopped myself: I have no need to master this.  I’m not gonna be a web designer/developer/coder.  I’m not supervising one, and I’m not looking to hire one.  I think it’s interesting stuff, and I’d like to be an expert, but the time I’d have to invest just to get into the middle of the “Novice” area of Seth’s chart just doesn’t make any sense for me.  If I really needed a website, I could go hire a real expert to do it.  So instead of pursuing mastery, I spent the minimum amount of time to get minimally competent to do what I wanted to do.

Why Mastery Matters

The first reason mastery matters is obvious: people pay for it.  If you’ve truly mastered something, you’re the one the can solve all the problems.  You understand things so well, you know how to handle situations novices haven’t even encountered or thought about.  When people are in a jam, this expertise commands a huge premium over the competition’s mere proficiency.

There are a slew of other good reasons too.  Many people have changed the world because they took something from the area or discipline they had mastered and applied it to an area nobody had ever thought to apply that thing before.  Mastery makes you more interesting.  Mastery, even in totally unrelated or seemingly unimportant fields, makes you more valuable to have around.

But, I have a more fundamental reason mastery is important: it makes you a better learner.

E. Glenn Schellenberg’s study about music lessons and IQ improvement in Kindergartners is extremely interesting.  He showed that 6 year olds who were given either keyboard, voice, or drama lessons scored significantly higher on IQ tests than those who didn’t take lessons.  Schellenberg further concluded that comparable nonmusical activities did not produce similar IQ increases.

Why?

Well, we don’t really know.  Some scientists theorize that something about music helps to restructure neural pathways in the brain.  This might be totally right.  But, I have my own theory: the way music is taught, with repetition and deliberate practice followed by immediate feedback, teaches kids the best way to learn.  I would bet if you did a study of 25 year olds who learned to play music at an early age you would find they not only have higher IQs, but more importantly, they are significantly more successful than kids who didn’t learn to play music.

Learning music is pretty simple: practice, encounter failure, tweak, practice, encounter failure, tweak . . . practice, attain perfection.

If you see the results this deliberate practice produces, which you can see almost immediately when you’re learning a new piece of music, you would naturally apply that practice elsewhere: chemistry, tennis, business, whatever.  The habits you learn when you study music are the same ones that would benefit you in every other area of study.

What does this have to do with mastery?

In addition to all the other benefits that come along with mastery, simply putting in the time to master a subject will teach you a lot about the art of mastering something.  It will teach you patience, discipline, how to handle failure, perseverance, and a whole lot about yourself.  After you master a few things, you’ll figure out how you learn best, and how to learn faster.  Once you manage to master one thing, mastering the second will be much easier, the third easier still, and so on, until pursuing mastery becomes habitual.

Posted in Advice, Creativity, Inspiration | 2 Comments

Understanding Exposure

Posted on March 1, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Understanding Exposure: Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO

Proper exposure is the single most important feature of any photograph.  It’s also the foundation of photography.  You can be at the right place at the right time, but if you can’t properly expose the shot, you’ve got nothing.  Today’s cameras do a pretty decent job of automatically selecting the proper exposure in most situations, but if you’ve spent any time shooting in the ‘auto’ mode, you know the camera rarely behaves exactly as you want it to.  This article will teach you everything you need to know about exposure so that you can bend your camera to your will, making it do exactly what you want, when you want.

The first step in learning how to properly expose a shot is to learn what an exposure is, and how an exposure is made.  Unfortunately, many looking to get into photography, and a surprising number of those who are producing very solid work, can be intimidated and confused when first learning about exposure due to the jargon photographers use to describe it.  Luckily, exposure is an exceeding simple concept.

Exposure Defined

Put simply, “exposure” is the amount of light that you allow to hit the film or sensor.  That’s it.  The definition is right in the word itself: it’s simply the number of photons you expose the film to.  You now understand what an exposure is!

We can make a very basic exposure by taking a light-tight box, putting a piece of film in it, and poking a hole in the box.  This allows the photons streaming through that hole to strike the film, exposing it.  How do we know when we have a “proper” exposure, one that makes the film react in a way that produces the image we want?  That, of course, is the ultimate goal.  Whether you’re using a box with a hole in it, or a modern camera, the principles outlined below apply just the same.

Controlling Exposure

We have three ways to control exposure: two of them, aperture and shutter speed, directly control how many photons will hit your sensor, and one of them, ISO, controls how sensitive your sensor is to those photons.  We will start at the back of the camera, and work our way to the front, examining how we can control the exposure with each of these 3 tools.

ISO

Film comes in many speeds, some more sensitive to light than others.  These different sensitivities, or speeds, were given arbitrary numbers to describe their sensitivity.  A 25 ISO film is ‘slower’, or less sensitive, than a 100 ISO film, which is slower than a 6400 ISO film.  Again, these numbers are entirely arbitrary, but each time you double the number, the film is twice (2 times) as sensitive to light.  To expose an image on ISO 100 film you need twice as many photons to hit the film than you do if you use ISO 200 film, because the ISO 200 is twice as sensitive.  So, how do we control how many photons hit the film?  Two ways:

Shutter Speed

Right in front of your sensor, or your film plane, is a shutter mechanism.  There are a variety of ways to make a shutter, but no matter which mechanism your camera uses, the shutter stays closed until you trip the shutter button, at which point the shutter opens and the film or sensor is exposed to the incoming photons.  Shutter speed is merely how long the shutter stays open.  This can be any length of time from days or hours to mere millionths of a second.  The longer the shutter stays open, the more photons can pass through it.  A 1 second exposure will allow twice as many photons to pass through the shutter than a ½ second exposure.

Aperture

An aperture is, by definition, an opening.  If you’re using that wooden box, the aperture is the hole you’ve punched in it.  Your camera’s lens likely contains a variable aperture, which lets you adjust the size of this opening.  In modern camera systems, the aperture is housed in the lens, in front of both the film and the shutter.

Because of the amazing way a lens works, by enlarging or restricting this opening, you aren’t changing how much of the image you see, or the field of view in photographer terms. Instead, you’re changing how many photons pass through the opening.  If you’ve ever noticed someone’s pupils dilate, you already understand this.  When it’s bright out, your pupils narrow to restrict how much light enters your eye, and when it’s dark out, your pupils dilate to allow more photons to enter your eye.  A camera’s aperture works exactly the same way.

Aperture, like film speed, is also described by numbers, but not arbitrary ones.  f/numbers or f/ stops, as they are called correspond to the amount of light allowed to pass through the aperture.  An f/ number is literally the focal length (f) divided by the physical diameter of the aperture.  So, a 100mm f/1 lens means that the aperture of that lens is capable of opening to 100mm in diameter.  A 100mm f/2.8 lens means that the aperture of the lens is capable of opening to 36mm in diameter (100/2.8).  As you can see, the larger the f/number, the more photons can physically pass through the aperture.

f/ numbers are traditionally marked off as follows: f/1, f/1.4, f/2, f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22, f/32, f/45, f/64.  Unlike film speed, f/ numbers are not arbitrary, but are instead based on the innate physical properties of lenses.  In order to cut the number of photons that pass through the lens in half, you reduce the aperture by a factor of √2, which is approximately 1.4.  So, in any lens, setting the aperture to f/1 will transmit twice as many photons as f/1.4, four times as many photons as f/2, and eight times as many photons as f/2.8.  Likewise, f/5.6 will transmit twice as many photons as f/8.  So, when someone tells you to “Open up the lens one stop” they’re telling you to move your setting from, say, f/5.6 (if that’s the setting you were using) to f/4.  Likewise, if someone tells you to stop-down, or close down the aperture one stop, you would move from f/5.6 to f/8.

Coming Together

We have three interconnected ways to affect exposure.  Two of those deal with how many photons are allowed to pass through to the film or sensor, and one deals with how sensitive that film or sensor is.  As you can now see, if you double the aperture and halve the shutter speed, or vice versa, you will allow the exact same number of photons to hit the sensor, and thus have the same exposure.  An exposure of 1 second at f/5.6 allows the exact same number of photons to hit the sensor as an exposure of 2 seconds at f/8.  Every one of the following combinations produces the exact same exposure:

  • ½ second at f/4
  • ¼ second at f/2.8
  • 1/8 second at f/2
  • 1/16 second at f/1.4
  • 1/32 second at f/1
  • 4 seconds at f/11
  • 8 seconds at f/16
  • 16 seconds at f/22
  • 32 seconds at f/32.

We can throw ISO in and affect things even more.  An exposure of ½ second at f/2.8 at 100 ISO will produce the same exposure as one made at 1 second at f/8 at 400 ISO.  Here’s why: (1) doubling the shutter speed allows in twice as much light, (2) doubling the ISO twice makes the sensor four times as sensitive to the incoming photons.  Combined, this means the exposure will be 3 stops brighter (one stop from doubling the length of the exposure and two stops from doubling the sensitivity of the film two times).  To compensate, we close the aperture by 3 stops, going from f/2.8 to f/8.

This relationship is known as reciprocity, and as we will see in the next section, it is extremely useful.

Why?

You may be wondering why we need to have 3 independent ways to control the exposure of a given image.  Why don’t we just use lenses with fixed apertures of f/2.8 or shutters with fixed speeds of 1/250th?  This would certainly make cameras and lenses far cheaper to manufacture, after all.  The answer requires a bit more explanation.

Aperture and Depth of Field

Depth of field (DOF) is the space in an image that contains acceptably sharp detail.  We say acceptably sharp because, while a lens can only focus precisely at one single point, the transition from in focus to out of focus is not sharp and abrupt but gradual on each side of the precise focus point.  A portrait of someone’s face where just the eyes are in focus and the rest is blurry has a shallow depth of field.  A landscape shot that’s sharp from the foreground all the way to the horizon has a large depth of field.

Luckily, because of the unique property of lenses, we can control the depth of field.  It turns out that when you use a larger aperture (ie a larger diameter opening, larger f/number, also called a “faster” aperture), you get a shallower DOF, meaning the space in the image that contains acceptably sharp detail is very small.  As you “stop down”, or decrease the size of the aperture, DOF gets larger, meaning that more of the scene appears to be in focus.

Now we can see why we wouldn’t always want an f/2.8 lens.  Portraits may look great with such shallow DOF, but sometimes we may want to shoot landscapes where the entire image appears to be in focus.  Additionally, there is a cost and weight factor to consider.  The larger the aperture, the more glass you need.  After all, the larger the diameter of the opening, the more glass it takes to cover that opening, and optical glass is very expensive and heavy.

There are other benefits to using lenses with large apertures.  As we know, a larger aperture lets more light through.  Because of the way modern auto-focusing works, this means that your autofocus will be faster and more accurate.  It also means that the image you see in the viewfinder will be brighter: modern cameras leave the aperture all the way open until you trip the shutter button, at which point it will stop down to whatever aperture you’ve selected and open the shutter.

Freeze!

Shutter speed also affects how sharp your final image will look, but not because of any property of the lens.  The longer the shutter is left open, the more opportunity there is for either the camera or the subject to move.  If the camera is locked down tight on a tripod and your subject is stationary, you can leave the shutter open as long as you want and your image will always be sharp.  However, if you’re hand-holding your camera, the slight movement of your body can cause the camera to move during the exposure, which results in a blurry shot.  Likewise, even if your camera is locked down on a tripod, if the subject itself is moving during the exposure you will still get a blurry shot.  The faster the shutter speed, the less opportunity something has to move during the exposure, be it your hand or the subject.  At 1/5000th of a second, even a racecar will appear to be frozen in time, because it simply doesn’t move very far in that time, but at 1/5th of a second, it will just appear to be a blur of color.

Noise

As you should now realize, photography is all about tradeoffs: larger apertures mean shorter exposures but also shallower depth of field; smaller apertures mean more depth of field, but require a longer exposure.  ISO, alas, does not escape the tradeoff game.  The more sensitive your film or sensor setting, the more noise will appear in the photograph.  All films, even slow, super fine grain films like Fuji Velvia, exhibit a certain amount of noise, which looks like a uniform grain across the image.  Films with a higher ISO rating, those that are more sensitive and require fewer photons to strike them to produce the same exposure, have bigger grain, and are described as “noisier”.  Where a fine grained film like Velvia looks like it’s made out of extremely fine grains of sand, very high ISO films look like they’re made out of little clumps of sand.  The effect of this noise is very evident in print: images shot at a higher ISO will be both noisier, grainier, and will also appear less sharp.

One of the many benefits of digital capture is the tremendous reduction in noise over film.  The digital sensors of today are essentially noise free at lower ISO settings.  The images don’t even look like they’re made out of fine grains of sand; they are so clean they don’t really have any grain at all.  What’s more, files shot at ISO 400 on my new Canon 5d Mark II exhibit almost no difference, in terms of noise, from files shot at ISO 100, and things will only continue to get better.  That said, at higher ISOs, digital files will exhibit quite a bit of noise, and this noise is generally uglier than film noise.  Where film noise gets grainy, but uniform, digital noise gets patterned, and splotchy, and because the way our eyes and brains work, just looks uglier.  Digital noise also tends to display color noise, which looks like random red, green, and blue splotches of color.  You have undoubtedly seen these characteristics in low-light shots taken by low-end point-and-shoot cameras.  Digital cameras already allow us to shoot in situations that were never before possible with film, and things will only get better, but the ISO tradeoff is still something that must be kept in mind.

Fin

You now understand the basics of exposure!  There are a few more considerations to take into account if you’re truly want to master exposure, but understanding these basic concepts is essential if you ever want to realize the vision you’ve got in your mind.

Update

See part two of this article, Understanding Exposure, pt. Practice

Posted in Art, Photography, Tips | 1 Comment

Clarity

Posted on February 28, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I just read this article this New York Times opinion piece that really struck a chord with me.  It’s not particularly interesting or insightful.  In fact, it’s really not that good.  But the author sure does use some fancy words, so he’s clearly very smart, and he must make some great points, right?

This seems to be the thinking in education today.  In fact, I’m a perfect example of it.  I went to an exclusive private school for Kindergarten through 8th grade that placed a heavy emphasis on building vocabulary and strong writing skills.  This was great, as building vocabulary and writing skills is important if you want to express yourself on paper or be able to read a classic book without a dictionary by your side.  I moved on to the local public school high school, which at the time was ranked well inside the top 100 schools in the nation, public or private.

There, in the “college level” classes, is where it started to happen: writing became less of a way to concisely express your ideas and more of a way to hide what you didn’t really know.  I had a large vocabulary, much larger than any teacher I ever had, so I did very well without much effort.  I was rewarded for being shallow but “educated”.  I graduated and went to UCLA, one of the top public universities in the nation, with one of the top philosophy departments.  I was sure I was smarter than everyone else, because I got good grades and nearly everything I wrote was an impenetrable fog of language, much like the NY Times article above.

Of course it didn’t take me long to realize that all the best thinkers came right out and said what they meant.  You don’t need to hide great thoughts in bad language.  If you don’t have great thoughts, you better be even more concise: after I took the extra time to actually wade through that NY Times article, I was pissed when I realized the author wasn’t saying anything new or interesting, and in fact made several logical errors.  I was even more pissed that I had to look up autochthonous.

The point, as Thoreau said, is to “simplify, simplify”.  This applies to photography just as much as writing.  The entire point of photography is to convey emotion, whether that emotion is fear, love, pain, empathy, joy, or just “aww, that’s pretty”.  There are things in the frame that add to the emotion you’re trying to convey, and things that distract.  The secret to making great art of any type is to eliminate everything that distracts.

Impressionism is perhaps the easiest example to look to first.  Artists like Monet stripped away almost all details, leaving only the most basic shapes and colors, which conveyed emotion pretty damn well.  You may think more modern artists break this rule of simplicity, but look at Picasso: he’s most famous for his cubist works, in which he shows objects and people from many different angles all at the same time.  This could get messy, but Picasso usually employs simple backgrounds, and simple scenes.  He strips away everything but what he’s trying to expose.  Jackson Pollack, took a different approach, swirling, dripping, and splattering paint all over the canvas from above, creating chaotic scenes.  But at the most basic level, it was just lines and dots.  You can’t get simpler than that.

Some types of photography make this much harder, but it’s still very possible to simplify scenes.  Zooming in very close to create abstract or macro views is often effective, but by no means the only option.  When physical space doesn’t allow you to use your feet to change the composition, Photoshop can.  This doesn’t mean you need to go wild with the clone tool though: you can easily “eliminate” areas just by darkening them, or by brightening the areas you want the eye to go to instead.

All of this is not to say that complexity doesn’t have its place.  Take Picasso’s Guernica.

Guernica

You know it’s about war the first time you see it, even though there isn’t a soldier or a gun in sight.  It’s a chaotic mass of bodies.  There is a ton of stuff going on.  But it’s about war and war is chaotic.  The piece would be saying something entirely different if it was just one guy with a gun.

The point is to be deliberate.  Act with clarity.  If your message requires being noisy or messy, be noisy or messy.  Most of the time though, the shorter your message, the more easily you can communicate it, the more easily you can share it with others and the more powerful that message will be.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Creativity, Inspiration, Photography, Style, Tips | 1 Comment

Chris Friel: Impressionist Photographer and Curing Boredom

Posted on February 24, 2011 by AJ Kessler

 

Photo by Chris Friel

I have no idea whether Mr. Friel calls himself an impressionist photorapher.  He might hate that term.  But, that’s what I’m calling him because that’s what his photographs make me think of.  They’re beautiful, often eerie, but generally have an ethereal quality about them, just like the impressionists of the 19th Century.

I first found Mr. Friel’s flickr account some time ago, and immediately followed him so his wonderful images would appear in my photostream each morning.

I then ran across this interview featuring Mr. Friel and discovered he only picked up a camera 4 years ago, at which point I got sad.

I was sad because I immersed myself in photography some 8 years ago.  I spent an ungodly amount of timing getting good at it.  You may have heard Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours to mastery” concept before, which Friel actually mentions in his interview.  I did that.  Reading about photography, looking at photography, actually taking photographs.  10,000 hours worth.

I’d say I got pretty good at what I set out to do, which was to make very large prints of very pretty places.  But, I recently got bored.  Maybe 10,000 hours of something will do that to you.  So, I took a break.  After the break, I was still bored.  Then I started playing around.  I started taking the types of photos that I later discovered Mr. Friel seems to specialize in.  The sad part comes from the fact that my photos don’t look nearly as cool as his do.

On the bright side, the experiment of going after a totally new type of shot served to not only rekindle my desire to shoot photos in generally, but also rekindled my desire to go out and shoot the types of photos I have gotten good at shooting.

By changing the reason I went out to shoot, in this case to experiment, learn, and try to bring home something totally different from anything I had shot before, I got the juices flowing.  Not only did those juices produce something new, they also made my bread and butter far more tasty, so to speak.

Summary:

  • Check out Mr. Friel’s constantly updated flickr here: Chris Friel’s Flickr
  • 10,000 hours to master a subject
  • Try something wildly new to kill boredom or break out of a rut; even if you don’t like the results of the new effort, you’ll get the juices flowing again, which will aid all of your creative work.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Pursuing Mastery

Posted on February 23, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I just stumbled across Penelope Trunk’s blog, which I’m enjoying quite a bit.  In her latest post, she discusses “mastery” and says she “will not embark on anything unless I know I can become a master at it.”  As evidence of this, she says she didn’t “start Ashtanga yoga until I knew I could do it every day for a year.  I did not start swing dancing lessons until I had enough money to take three lessons a day, with three different teachers.  I’m not interested in merely trying something.  I just find it totally unrewarding.”

My first response to that wasn’t “wow, that’s awesome” or “wow, that’s dedicated.”  My first response was “wow, that’s batshit crazy.”

I’m all about pursuing mastery, but how the hell do you know whether you want to master something if you don’t try it first?  I’ve thought it would be cool to master a ton of different things, but when I tried them out, I realized they suck.

How did Penelope decide she wanted to master yoga, particularly Ashtanga yoga, without ever trying it?  Did she just think it sounded cool, dive into it, and stick with it regardless of whether she enjoyed it or not?  And who the hell would take three swing dancing lessons a day before figuring out whether they liked to swing dance?

Nobody.

Pursuing mastery is hard fucking work.  It’s a grind.  That’s why so few people do it.  Think about how much you’d miss out on if you really worked that way.  If you pursued mastery in every new thing you picked up, you’d get great at a number of things, but you wouldn’t have much time for new experiences.  Assuming you have to support yourself, you could realistically only try a couple new things every couple of years.

The much better way, in my view, is to try everything, in cycles.  Be a dilettante for a month or two a year (depending on how many things you’re currently trying to master).  Try as many things as you can.  Figure out if one of those things is something you’d like to pursue further.  Take a few violin lessons, a few swing dance classes, go rock climbing a few times, play a few games of chess in the park.  Whatever you think might be cool.

I guarantee you some of the things you think you’re interested in won’t be a good fit after you try it.  You might find the violin annoying, you might find you don’t like hugging sweaty strangers, you might find your finger joints really hurt when you rock climb, you might find sitting in the park sucks and chess is boring.  You’ll never know if you don’t try.

After you try all these things, then pursue mastery in an area you actually like.  Find out what you’re interested in before you dive in. It’s true that the more time you spend at something and the better you get at it, the more you’ll tend to like it.  But why start with something you’re just not into when there’s so much more out there?  Forcing yourself to put in the time to master something is hard enough when it’s something you like, let alone when it’s something you’re not that into.

For example, I entered high school without a sport.  I thought water polo sounded cool so I went out for it.  Practices were 30 minutes from my house, from 6:30-11:00 every night, so that wasn’t so appealing.  Even in San Diego, it’s fairly cold outside at 11:00pm in October, especially when you’re wet.  I went anyways, and that first practice was absolutely brutal.  I wanted to quit that night, but I decided to stick around for one more.  It was hard, but the second night was a ton of fun, and I was hooked.  By the end of the season I was the best player on the freshman team, and I loved the game.

Contrast that with swim team practice, which was only 90 minutes a day, right after school in the spring semester, in the unbelievably awesome San Diego sun.  I hated it instantly.  I passionately hated swimming for four years, and I still hate it today.  It’s so goddamn boring.  If I didn’t need to stay in shape for polo, I never would have done it after trying it.

Am I better off for having mastered swimming? You could argue I’m more interesting since I have an in depth understanding of it and could talk to anyone for an hour about the sport, the technique, my experiences, etc.  But had I mastered underwater basket weaving, or some other useless skill, I don’t think I’d be any happier or better off.  I could have poured all those hours into something else, like guitar, or photography, or finding something I truly loved that I would do for the rest of my life.

What I do love about Penelope’s approach is the drive to succeed.  The desire to master a bunch of different things is really awesome, and something I aspire to.  After all, mastery is one of the key ingredients for an interesting person and an interesting life.

Posted in Advice, Food For Thought, Inspiration, Self-Improvement | Leave a comment

Why I Hate HDR

Posted on February 22, 2011 by AJ Kessler

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range.  Dynamic Range, for our purposes, is the amount of information a sensor can record between the points where the sensor renders input as white and where the sensor renders input as black in any given scene.  Dynamic Range is measured in f/stops, so, for example, my Canon 5d2 has a dynamic range of nearly 12 stops.  Now, imagine a scene partly in shadow and partly in sun.  A 12 stop dynamic range means I could record at least some detail in the shadow and some detail in the bright part of the image, even if the bright part of the image was 4096 times brighter than the shadow part.

When there’s more than 12 stops difference between the light and dark areas of a scene, I must choose to expose for either the bright part or the dark part.  If I choose to expose for the dark part, the part that’s more than 12 stops brighter will turn to white, or be blown out, as we say.  If I choose to expose for the light part, the part that’s more than 12 stops darker will turn to black, or be blocked up, as we say.

This is a problem photographers once solved with filters; graduated neutral density filters had a dark half and a light half.  Block some light from the bright part of your image and now you’re back within the dynamic range your camera can handle.  You could also do this with just a black piece of paper, removing part-way through an exposure.  When Photoshop first introduced layers, photographers sometimes handled this problem by blending the properly exposed parts of two images together to make one properly exposed image.

Now, as you might start to understand, all photography is actually LOW dynamic range.  The whole point of filters and black paper and photo blending is to take the high dynamic range of the natural world and compress it down to a low enough dynamic range that our cameras and printers and papers can handle.

Then came “HDR photography”.  The term came to be applied to photography created via tone-mapping by software like Photomatix.  Tone-mapping means taking one set of colors or tones and mapping them onto another.  Take a look at the picture on Photomatix’s home page:

Tone Mapped Image

Notice that there’s not a big difference between the lightest part of the scene and the darkest?  Look at the dirt beneath the flowers.  Have you ever seen a flower bed where the dirt is as bright as the flowers?  Nope.  How about the weird trees on the left that have strange dark areas around the tops?  That doesn’t look right either.  What about the clouds with their strange dullness, even though you apparently have dark parts next light parts (but no contrast?!)

That’s why I hate “HDR” as it’s known.  Not because I demand photos to render scenes as accurately as possible, lord knows that’s not my goal, but because I like photos to either render scenes beautifully, or powerfully, or emotionally, or artistically; not weirdly or garishly. Doesn’t that dirt just make the scene look like it’s some sloppy stage background?  Nothing jumps out at me!  Everything’s flat and even and boring!  Where’s the subject?  Where’s the drama!?  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.  Ugghh.

I guess I’m in the minority though, because the public seems to eat this shit up.  So, if you like this stuff, if you’re making money selling it, more power to ya.  But I still hate it.

Posted in Aesthetics, Art, Creativity, Food For Thought, Photography, Style | 3 Comments

How To Negotiate

Posted on February 22, 2011 by AJ Kessler
(Note: this post attempts to outline the material covered in a 200 page book, a semester long class, and a 6 day seminar in 2500 words.  It can’t possibly cover everything, but it covers a lot.  I’ve tried to bold sentences to make it easier to skim.)

Many people think of skilled negotiators as those who score the best deals.  Those fabled people who manage to talk a salesman into letting go of a car for thousands less than what he paid for it, or who manage to get unbelievable concessions from their boss, wife, or adversary de jure.  The reason great negotiators are so lionized is because we have this idea that he can convince others to willingly make themselves worse off for his benefit.  Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.  Good negotiation isn’t getting people to accept your unreasonable demands: it’s getting people who otherwise wouldn’t to agree to a fair deal.

“If you enter an antique store to buy a sterling silver George IV tea set worth thousands of dollars and all you have is a one hundred-dollar bill, you should not expect skillful negotiation to overcome the difference.”

Distributive v. Integrative

Distributive bargaining is about how to distribute a fixed pie.  The seller takes the position that he wants $1000 for his car, and I take the position that I can only pay $500.  There’s a $500 pool of difference that needs to be distributed before a deal can be reached.  I need to come up $500, seller needs to come down $500, or some combination in between that adds up to $500.  One or both of us needs to change our position.  As we argue over positions, we tend to get locked into those positions and our egos tend to become identified with those positions.  Nothing good ever happened when somebody’s ego got involved.  You may charm the seller, regale him with stories that make him take pity on you, seduce him, whatever.  But, he’s either willing and able change his position or not.  There’s nothing else to it.

Integrative bargaining doesn’t believe in a fixed pie.  Integrative bargaining seeks to throw everything on the table, not just deal with some arbitrary pool of value the parties created with their extreme initial offers.  Integrative bargaining recognizes that behind every position is a multitude of interests that need satisfying.  The good negotiator coaxes those interests out of the other party and then figures out how to meet those interests.

But Distributive Bargaining is the Only Way!

Let’s go back to the sterling silver tea set from the quote above.  Most people would say the price on the tea set is non-negotiable.  At best, you might be able to knock a bit off, but it’s a distributive bargaining game: the store’s position is to get as much money as it can, and my position is to pay as little as possible.  That might be true some of the time.  But, how do I know if I don’t ask?  Maybe the owner needs some skill I can provide.  Maybe the store is flush with cash but needs some help getting its website set up, or help with an event, or marketing, or inventory control, or whatever.  You might very well be able to walk out the door with the tea set under your arm and the $100 bill in your pocket if you can satisfy the seller’s interests in some other way.

How to Win

We’ve already discussed Rule One: don’t bargain over positions.

Rule Two is to separate the people from the problem.  This first requires you to remember that the people you are bargaining with are people, even if they represent a corporate entity.  They have their own interests, both in the substance of the negotiation and in the relationship.  They have human faults like anger and ego and fear.  The problem with positional bargaining is that these people problems tend to get tangled up with the substantive problem.  The key to good negotiating is to separate the people problems from the substantive problem.

The seminal negotiation book, Getting To Yes, identifies three main people problems: those of perception, emotion, and communication.

Perception problems are important to understand because, in any dispute, the “truth” is irrelevant: the disagreement stems from the reality as each side perceives it.  You can’t solve a problem with integrative bargaining techniques if you don’t understand how the other side perceives the problem.  Put yourself in their shoes; if this is difficult for you, simply ask them how they feel about X, or why they concluded X.  Don’t ever deduce their intentions from your own fears.  Don’t blame them for your problem, even if they caused it.  Look for opportunities to act inconsistently with their perceptions.  You can often change someone’s perception of the situation by making sure they participate in the process, which gives them a stake in the outcome.  This also helps them save face with their principles or constituents: they might think they’ll be perceived as losers if they accept your terms, but think they’ll be perceived as victors if they get to propose or announce those very same terms.  Bottom line: figure out what’s driving their perception of the issue.

Emotion problems must be understood and controlled.  Unchecked emotions, especially anger, can quickly bring negotiations to an impasse or an end.  Keys to dealing with emotions include 1) recognizing and explicitly discussing them, which allows them to be disarmed; 2) not reacting to emotional outbursts, but instead recognizing and discussing them; and 3) offering symbolic gestures that indicate respect, such as an apology or a gift.

Communication problems are obviously problematic, but the first two are easily dealt with.  (1) Talk with the other side so as to be understood, not just to talk or to play to constituents or principles.  (2) Listen.  Don’t just think about what you’re going to say next.  (3) The third problem, misunderstanding, is more difficult.  The example given in Getting To Yes is that of U.N Secretary General Waldheim attempting to secure the release of American hostages from Iran by announcing himself as a mediator who had come to work out a compromise.  The problem was, in Persian, “mediator” meant “meddler” and “compromise” only had the meaning we give it when we say “his integrity was compromised”.  Within an hour of his announcement, his car was being stoned by angry Iranians.  Avoiding misunderstanding requires active listening and acknowledgment of what the other side says, in real time.  You also want to speak about yourself, and particularly your feelings, rather then about them and their actions.  It’s hard to challenge a statement about how you feel.

Attack the Problem

By overcoming these three people problems, you can then attack the substantive problem instead of the people.  To do this, you must use Rule Three: focus on interests, not positions.  To identify what the other side’s interests are, ask them why they took the position they did.  Ask why they didn’t choose another position.  The most powerful interests are basic human needs: security, economic well-being, a sense of belonging, recognition, and control over one’s life.  Think about how the situation might be affecting these basic interests and then ask about them.  State your own basic interests specifically and vividly: make them come alive.  Discuss interests before proposing solutions: if solutions come first, your real interests will be ignored or look like mere justifications for an arbitrary position.  Being hard on the problem, and your interests, allows you to be soft of the people, which makes everyone happier, and the environment more conducive to dealmaking.

Invent Solutions

Once you can identify what each party’s real interest is, it’s easy to come up with options that make each party better off.  Rule Four is to invent options in discrete steps: 1) brainstorm as many options as possible without attribution or evaluation; 2) develop the ideas by working out some details; 3) evaluate the ideas externally.  “Nothing is so harmful to inventing as a critical sense waiting to pounce on the drawbacks of any new idea.  Judgment hinders imagination.”

The evaluation stage is important because this is where bargaining on the merits begins.  You’ll want to eliminate options that wouldn’t ever be accepted.  Imagine how the other side would fare if it accepted each option.  Would it be crucified?  Then scratch that one.  You’ll also want to eliminate prejudicial options, even if the other party may irrationally accept them.  “An outcome in which the other side gets absolutely nothing is worse for you than one which leaves them mollified.  In almost every case, your satisfaction depends to a degree on making the other side sufficiently content with an agreement to want to live up to it.”

Rule Five is to search out solutions that are low cost to you but high benefit to them.  Maybe they care about taking credit, or announcing the settlement.  Things you don’t care about may be highly valuable to the other side.  Find those things.  You’ll also want to search out options that the other side could accept on precedent.  Have they made a decision or statement in the past that aligns with your proposal?  If so, point it out.  If they’ve done it in the past, point to that objective standard as to why they should go along this time as well.  It makes it much harder to say no.

Bargaining

Sometimes, you’ll be able to invent an option that everyone can instantly agree on.  Sometimes an agreement is possible because each side wants different things.  Often times though, there is a basic disagreement: you want the rent to be $400 a month and the landlord wants $800 a month.  What do you do when you’ve exhausted other creative solutions to bridge the gap?  Rule Six: Insist on using objective criteria.  Don’t start a battle of wills, manning positions and digging in.  Instead, bring standards of fairness, efficiency, or scientific merit, to bear on the problem.  Develop these objective criteria beforehand and provide alternative standards.  Some of these might be market value, precedent, scientific judgment, professional standards, efficiency, costs, what a court would decide, moral standards, equality, tradition, or reciprocity.  When you raise these, frame them as a joint search for fairness.  If the other side insists on their arbitrary position, ask them how they came to that number, or why they think it’s fair.  Most importantly, never yield to pressure.

Power Plays

This is especially true when the other side is more powerful.  Rule Seven: He who cares least, wins.  If walking away is an appealing choice, if they need you more than you need them, you’ve got power.  In negotiation-speak, this means having a strong BATNA, or Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement.  To develop a BATNA, list your conceivable alternatives, explore those alternatives and turn the best ones into practical alternatives, then choose the best practical alternative.  If the other side has the power, sometimes you can’t win.  In those cases, the best thing negotiation skills can do for you is prevent you from entering a bad deal and help you make the most of what you do have.  Two things to remember: 1) don’t set a bottom line.  It prevents you from thinking creatively.  Instead, set a trip wire: a number better than your BATNA, that, once tripped, reminds you to reexamine the whole situation. 2) if the other side’s BATNA is so strong they don’t even want to negotiate, think of ways to weaken it.  Suing them is one way that weakens their alternative (ignoring you).

Negotiating With Assholes

Sometimes you’ll deal with people who don’t want to play your mutually advantageous game, but want to man positions and exchange cannon fire.  Rule Eight: be relentlessly optimistic.  You can change whatever game is being played simply by starting a new one.  There are a few tricks to changing the game: 1) assume every position they take is a genuine attempt to address the basic concerns of each side, so ask them how they think their position addresses those interests. 2) Discuss, hypothetically, what would happen if their position was accepted. 3) Ask what they would do they were in your situation. 5) Ask questions.  Remain uncomfortably silent if they give insufficient answers.  6) If these fail, try using the one-text approach where both sides simultaneously give input on a single draft a third part is preparing, with revisions being made until the draft is satisfactory to all parties.

Sometimes you’ll deal with people who play dirty.  Rule Nine: negotiate the rules of the game.  When someone deliberately deceives you, or tries to put you in stressful situations or makes personal attacks, or makes extreme or escalating demands, or just flat out refuses to negotiate, recognize the tactic, raise the issue explicitly, and question the tactic’s legitimacy and desirability.  Negotiate over it. Don’t get angry at the person employing the tactic.  Separate the people from the problem, focus on interests, invent options for mutual gain, insist on using objective criteria, and know your BATNA.  For example, explain that seating you in the low, slanted chair facing the sun is making you tired and uncomfortable, and that you can’t negotiate like that.  Ask if the other side will be sitting in that chair after halftime.  Ask if that serves either party’s interest.  Since it doesn’t, suggest some options for mutual gain and explain how they would be beneficial.  If that fails, insist on objective criteria.  If that fails, turn to your BATNA.

Conclusion

  1. Don’t bargain over positions
  2. Separate the people from the problem
  3. Focus on interests, not positions
  4. Invent options in discrete steps; don’t judge
  5. Search out solutions that are low-cost to you, high-benefit to them
  6. Insist on using objective criteria
  7. He who cares least wins
  8. Be relentlessly optimistic
  9. Negotiate the rules of the game

HT: This post owes a great debt to the seminal book Getting To Yes, both in terms of substance and form.  The book goes into far more depth than I could, providing great examples of just how this stuff works.  I would highly recommend giving it multiple reads if you want to become a better negotiator.

Posted in Advice, Self-Improvement, Tips | 4 Comments

Choreography (Plan or Fail)

Posted on February 21, 2011 by AJ Kessler

We generally use a flash or some other light source to throw light on something that needs to be brighter.  But, what happens if your flash or light source is too small to properly illuminate what you want?  One option is to paint it with light: during a long exposure, “paint” over whatever you want to be illuminated with your light source.  Sounds even enough.

Anyone who’s actually used this technique knows what a pain it can be to get it just right.  I’ve spent hours in the desert with a headlamp trying to get that stupid Joshua Tree lit up the way I want it.  So imagine trying get 50 people to do it at the same time.  In order to light up a whole city…

That’s just what the Photo Association of Toledo did.  You can read about the undertaking here.  I can tell you, having stood in the same spot that photo was taken, Toledo is a pretty tiny, hilltop, old-world, walled city.  But it’s still a city where tens of thousands of people live.  It’s still a freaking CITY.  So, spoiler alert: the shot took a lot of planning, and lots of trial and error.

http://www.caborian.com/20101022/pintando-con-luz-toda-una-ciudad/ (HT Strobist).

Fantastic, right?

Now the bad news: all photography takes planning.  Even if you don’t shoot massive, choreographed scenes.  If you’re interest is shooting weddings, you might think this is obvious.  But portraits, landscapes, wildlife shooting, all of it requires a good deal of planning if you want to be consistently successful.

You might argue that some of the best, most compelling photography comes by capturing the unexpected, the random, the unpredictable.  You can’t plan for the unpredictable, no matter what James Bond says (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFrWCE9B18c).

First, while you can’t plan for the unexpected, the majority of those “chance” or “lucky” shots result from ridiculous amounts of time spent preparing for them.  Take Mangelsen’s famous “Catch of the Day” (http://www.mangelsen.com/store/Posters___Catch_of_the_Day___Commemorative_Edition_Fine_Art_Poster___1698CMPOST?Args=)  Sure, it’s lucky that he timed the shot perfectly.  But he had to plan to even be in the spot to get the shot.  He had to research where the bears fish in the river (not so well known before his shot popularized the area).  He had to plan where he was going to shoot from, the gear he need to get the shot, what time he needed to be there to catch prime feeding action, etc. etc.  Only after all the planning, and likely 10,000 “unlucky” frames, did he get that lucky shot.

This is more of a caveat than an imploration.  I’ve been on plenty of trips to gorgeous locales where I’ve taken my camera along hoping to get the opportunity to take some landscape shots, but without actually doing any planning.  Guess what invariably happens?  I come back with crap.  Which is fine, unless you’ve psyched yourself up about the great shot you’re going to get.  If you don’t plan ahead, chances are you won’t come home with anything you’re happy with.

So, plan ahead, or expect mediocrity.

Posted in Art, Creativity, Photography | Leave a comment

How to Learn Faster

Posted on February 18, 2011 by AJ Kessler

My good friend works full time for a nice little financial planning and tax advice business.  He also loves going to football and basketball games, traveling, hanging out with friends, taking care of his mom, and drinking.  He’s a busy guy.  Oh, and he also just finished his first semester at law school.  With straight A’s.  How?

Reading is Terrible

I read a lot of books, articles and blogs about everything from law, to photography, to history, to philosophy.  I mean a stupid amount of reading. I could, and on my worst days do, spend 6 hours just reading.

That last sentence is key. On my worst days, I spend 6 hours just reading.

The problem is that reading alone is about the worst way to learn something. I’ve got a pretty good memory. I’ll read something that strikes me as interesting or useful and I’ll be able to remember it and even explain it to somebody six months later. But that’s about it.

If I don’t find something particularly interesting, the details get muddy.  I won’t be able to remember it later.  Even if it is interesting, and I can remember it, that doesn’t always mean I’ll be able to recall it when it would be most useful.

On my best days, I may spend only 30 minutes reading, but I may master a new subject.

The key is to not just read.  If nothing else, reading something aloud will do a much better job of cementing something in your brain.  Explaining something, out loud, after you’ve read it is even better.  If you do nothing else, explaining what you’ve just read, out loud, will increase your long term retention by nearly 7 times. For some people, writing up an explanation will do the same, but I’ve found the out-loud explanation is even more beneficial. YMMV.  The reason explaining something is so powerful is because it first requires you to break it down.

Break It Down

To adequately explain something, you’ve got to understand all parts of it.  This requires breaking down a concept or a skill into its distinct parts.  This is true for everything from a new language to a backhand slice. Tim Ferriss has a great article about how he breaks down new languages. Here’s how I would explain how to hit a backhand slice:

  1. how to hold the racket in a continental grip,
  2. how to stagger your feet properly,
  3. how to bend your knees so your elbow is near the height of the contact point
  4. how much backswing to take
  5. the angle of the racket face
  6. the angle to strike the ball at
  7. the follow through
  8. the pop up to drive the ball deeper

I could certainly learn how to hit a backhand slice without doing this breakdown.  I could just go out and swing at the ball, trying different things, until I get a reasonably consistent result.  But that would take forever.  I would have to hit literally thousands of balls, trying various combinations of these 8 variables until I stumbled upon one that sort of, half-way worked.  This obviously isn’t an effective or efficient.  By breaking it down, I can understand exactly what my body is supposed to do before I ever get near a tennis ball.

After you’ve broken the information down, after you can explain it to someone else, you’re done studying.  Use Pareto’s Law: 20% of the effort for 80% of the results.  More time spent at this stage will garner you smaller and smaller returns.  Instead, now’s the time to practice.

Just Do It

No matter what you’re reading about, whether it’s law or history or a technique or a language, or how to play a blues riff or hit a tennis ball, the absolute best way to learn it is to do it.  Learn enough so that you understand the basics and then go do it.

You can read about how to use Photoshop’s Pen Tool for days, literally, or you can read about it for 5 minutes to understand the basics, play with it for 30 minutes, and you’ll be proficient.  You can spend days reading through the entirety of Canyon Conundrum by Dan Margulis to learn all about the LAB color mode, or you can read a few paragraphs, play around for 5 minutes, and have pretty much mastered a kick ass technique. (I highly recommend the book by the way).  Once you do a color separation via LAB 2 or 3 times, you’ll never forget how to do it.  It’s fantastic.

Plugging Holes

You will enivitably fail when using this technique.  That’s by design.  If you don’t fail at first, you’re putting in way too much time in the study/break down department.  If used effectively, you’re starting to practice when you’ve only put in 20% of the work, but getting 80% of the result.  That means you’re still missing 20%.  (That may be fine for some things, but if you need to get more, you’re going to have to plug holes.)

Study Federer’s slice, break it down, explain what he’s doing, then go try it.  What’s the worst that could happen?  If you fail miserably, you go back, revise your break down, and then try again.  Practice quickly identifies the holes in your understanding so you can plug them.  Mastering something in the abstract is a huge waste of effort.  Understand the basics of what’s required ahead of time, then try to execute.

This applies to every area of your life.  In law school, your finals count for 100% of your grade and cover everything you learned during the semester.  Most people study by just pouring over the books and notes they took.  Most people also suck at law school.  I told my good friend to create his own outline of each course (step one, break it down) and then to take practice tests under simulated test conditions (step two, actually do it).  Once you start taking the practice tests, you can immediately identify the areas you don’t fully understand.  At that point you go back, revise your break down, and take another test.

My friend didn’t have the time to spend pouring over the texts like his competition did, but he still smoked them because he learns faster and performs better using this technique.

Summary

  1. Reading, by itself, is a terrible way to retain information.
  2. Instead, break down the information, technique, or skill into its component parts
  3. Explain that information, technique, or skill out loud, as if teaching someone else
  4. Once you have a basic understanding of the information, technique, or skill, go practice it
  5. Once you fail, go back, revise your break down, and practice again
  6. Repeat step 5 until you’ve reached an acceptable level of skill
Posted in Advice, Creativity, Inspiration, Self-Improvement, Tips | 8 Comments

How Equipment Affects Creativity

Posted on February 17, 2011 by AJ Kessler

The Luminous Landscape just published a very thoughtful essay by Mark Dubovoy about whether equipment affects creativity.  In short, his answer was it absolutely does. I agree with him, but I have some additional points below, which are applicable beyond photography.

Some argue vociferously that tools don’t really matter: Ansel Adams could have taken those shots with any camera.  Ken Rockwell’s $100 camera takes just as good a picture as his $8000 camera.  Obviously, in some cases that may be entirely true.  But, every tool has its own limitations.  If they didn’t, there’d only be one tool.

Think about the limitations of your equipment.  Is your view camera heavy?  Does your point and shoot not allow you to make big enlargements?  Does your pinhole camera force you to take long exposures?

When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When I shoot with my 5d2, with the intention of stitching together a panorama, the way I see and the way I shoot are totally different than when I’m shooting with a 617 Fuji.  With the film camera, I look to capture action and movement.  That’s a pain in the ass to deal with when I’m stitching though, since things moving between frames creates problems.  So when I shoot digital, I try to use long exposures to smooth out any movements, or I pick subjects that aren’t going anywhere.

So not only does my subject and the way I shoot change depending on what camera I’m shooting, so does my mood.  With digital, shooting is often harder.  It’s sometimes frustrating.  With film, I’m often happier because the process becomes so much easier.  And my mood definitely affects the type of image that comes out of the box.

Similarly, if I’ve got my 50/1.4 on my 5d2, everything’s gonna get a shallow depth of field.  I paid for the damn glass, right? Might as well.  The compositions I start seeing all seek to utilize that.  If I’m using my point and shoot, I’ve got essentially unlimited depth of field, so I’m start looking for compositions where I can utilize it.  I don’t even think about it at the time, but looking back at my shots, that’s what inevitably happens.  When I pick up my 100-400, I take 5x as many shots at 400 than I do at 100 200 or 300.

None of this is necessarily bad, but it can definitely lead to things getting stale.  Zeb Andrews had a great line on one of his recent flickr posts: “I have really come to value photographing the same places in different ways, as opposed to different places all the same way.”

I spend an awful lot of time in the same places, trying to get new compositions, new conditions, and new shots.  But, almost all of the time, I’m photographing those places in essentially the same way.  And I got pretty bored with photography.

So how do I get those creative juices flowing again?  Well, I picked up some new equipment, and my juices are flowing.  I didn’t get a new lens or body.  I started using Adobe Illustrator to make some elaborate designs.  I started playing guitar again.  I built this blog.  I wrote this post.  While I may not be great at any of those other things, my juices are flowing again, both with those tools, and with photography.

So if you’re stuck or bored, change the equipment.  Find another outlet, whether it’s cooking, or painting, or singing, or jamming.  I guarantee you’ll get those juices flowing again, and your art will be better for it.

Posted in Advice, Art, Creativity, Inspiration, Photography, Tips | Leave a comment

Changing Your Spots

Posted on February 16, 2011 by AJ Kessler

This is a pretty insightful little piece by landscape photographer Alain Briot that addresses a situation that nearly exactly mirrors my own.

I too was drawn to the panoramic format, though my love for it actually started before I ever picked up a camera. As soon as I started taking pictures, my eye just sought out panoramic compositions. It was my self-described style. As Mr. Briot explains:

“When I created this image the most important aspect of it for me was the panoramic composition. Certainly, the light was important and I was aware that the light made the image. However, it was the panoramic format that I thought was going to define my style.”

But, just like Mr. Briot, I quickly discovered it wasn’t exactly the panoramic format that defined my style. It was the quality of the light I chased (currently dark and moody). It was the sweeping, enveloping feeling of the scenes I was after.  Those things currently define my style.

I think.

Who knows though. Maybe I’ll look down some day soon and discover my spots have changed yet again.

Posted in Art, Food For Thought, Photography, Style | Leave a comment

Change Someone’s World

Posted on February 16, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Sometimes we forget that ordinary photos,  not just those from the front lines or inside a repressive regime, can change people’s lives.

World’s Coolest Grandma

If you can’t think of anyone you could help, consider joining the Help-Portrait project (http://help-portrait.com/)

Posted in Art, Food For Thought, Inspiration, Photography | Leave a comment

HOME (documentary)

Posted on February 16, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Just stumbled across this gorgeously shot enviro-doc (LINK)

The essence of it is well captured in the first two lines of its description:

“We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic Darwinian evolution of the Earth’s climate.”

The entirety of the film looks to be shot from the air, which, given the message, I thought was brilliantly effective. I’ve seen other films use this technique, but it’s pretty cool when the entire movie is shot this way. It really aids the “look how stupid these people are” feel.

It’s definitely worth a view, for the gorgeous photography alone. It makes me want to run out and rent a helicopter.

Posted in Aesthetics, Inspiration, Photography, Video | Leave a comment

What’s the Use?

Posted on February 15, 2011 by AJ Kessler

I know more than a few landscape photographers who are photographers, mostly, because they get to be outside and see cool stuff.

I know photographers who take photos because they like to call themselves photographers, or because they like the group of friends the go shoot with.

I know photographers who shoot pictures mainly to post online, so that they can be involved in any number of the bustling online communities.

There’s nothing wrong with any one of these reasons.  If you like to shoot because you like hanging out with other people who shoot, that’s fantastic.  Go sick.

But, realize why you’re doing it.

Realize what your use of the activity is.

If you only care about posting things online, or being outside, do you need that new $3000 5dMark3, or that nifty new $3000 Nikon 12-24 with a Canon mount?  If it’s a status thing, sure, but you certainly don’t need that to take pictures that will look fantastic online.

What is your art supposed to do when it’s done properly?

How do you know when it’s successful?

Hammer these things out and you’ll likely save yourself loads of frustration down the road.

Note: In no way does this apply only to photography or art

HT: Seth Godin

Posted in Advice, Art, Food For Thought, Inspiration, Photography, Self-Improvement | Leave a comment

A Darwinian Theory of Beauty

Posted on February 14, 2011 by AJ Kessler

Is beauty in the eye of the beholder?  Or the culturally conditioned eye of the beholder?  That’s the oft proffered explanation.  But why do the Japanese love Mozart?  Why is Shakespeare read the world over?  Denis Dutton argues that what people find beautiful is actually embedded in our DNA, not dictated by our culture or our particular upbringing.  It’s a very interesting 15 minute speech, which you can see here in its entirety here.

Starting at 7:00, Mr. Dutton discusses a type of landscape every human being on the planet finds attractive:

“People in very different cultures all over the world tend to like a particular kind of landscape, a landscape that just happens to be similar to the pleistocene savannas where we evolved . . . It’s a kind of Hudson River school landscape featuring open spaces of low grasses interspersed with copses of trees.  The trees, by the way, are often preferred if they fork near the ground, that is to say, if they’re trees you could scramble up if you were in a tight fix.  The landscape shows the presence of water directly in view or evidence of water in a bluish distance, indication of animal or bird life, as well as diverse greenery, and finally, get this, a path, or a road, or perhaps a riverbank or shoreline, that extends into the distance, almost inviting you to follow it.  This landscape type is regarded as beautiful even by people in countries that don’t have it.  The ideal savanna landscape is one of the clearest examples where human beings everywhere find beauty in similar visual experience.”

“But, somebody might argue, that’s natural beauty.  How about artistic beauty?  Isn’t that exhaustively cultural?  No, I don’t think it is.”

Mr. Dutton goes on to argue that, at the most basic level, humans are programmed to find beauty in something done well.  This traces back 100,000 years, when early man would make hand axes as a display of their fitness as mating material.

But what does it mean to do something well?  If you’re in an established field, this seems easy: just do it better than most of the other people doing the same thing.

If you’re the first in your field, it gets more complicated.  If you’re first, there’s no standard against which to measure you.  The first impressionist works looked totally different from the “normal” art of the time.  Same with Van Gogh.  Jackson Pollock was even more radically different.  Van Gogh did something no one else was doing, but didn’t have any success during his life. Jackson Pollock did something no one else was doing, and had massive success.  The impressionists banded together and eventually became financially secure.

There are myriad reasons why some artists are wildly successful while others aren’t.  Jackson Pollock had Peggy Guggenheim prosthelytizing for him. The impressionists had their own patrons to back them. Van Gogh was unknown until his desperate sister-in-law began marketing his work.

The bottom line is, if you’re doing something radically different from others, it’s often hard for the art itself to communicate the skill it took to create it.  If your art itself doesn’t communicate that, make sure you do.

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