The Perceptive Photographer

In this week's podcast, I got interested in looking at how fraud can rear its ugly head in our creative practice. I was researching something else, and I wanted to see the exact definition of the word fraud. When I looked the word up, I found the following:

" a person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities."

As I read the definition, I realize there are times when I have ascribed the word fraud to my photography and creative practice. I noticed this when I had to relearn some of the things I knew I had already learned in Photoshop. Did the fact that I had forgotten and had to look it up mean that I was a fraud? Did the fact that I thought I already knew the skill but in but couldn't make me a fraud? If someone had asked if I knew how to do that in Photoshop and I said yes make me a fraud? I used to know it. Is forgetting something make me a fraud? I had to find a way to process those questions.

It's about time for my yearly physical with my doctor, and it got me thinking about some of the test results you get back during your appointment. One of the things that I find interesting is that they have a standard set of bloodwork they do year-over-year. By doing the same basic test year-over-year, they have something to compare and benchmark how well we're doing with our health. They are also able to use these test to help identify potential problems that may come up in the future.

I was wondering if we could do something similar with our creative practice or with our photography. Is there a set of test we could come up with that would tell us our overall health as a relates to our creative practice and our photography?

In this week's podcast, we take a look at the impact of not allowing ourselves to have any alone time with our thoughts or moments of silence by filling that time with our smartphones. I believe part of the creative practice is allowing yourself to have moments with your thoughts and observations. However, recently I noticed that when I have a spare 30 seconds to a few minutes, I reach into my pocket and grab my phone. Most of the time, I don't even know I did it. This action has become an involuntary response. I spent that time looking at social media, playing a game, or just randomly checking out various apps on my phone rather than observing, thinking and reacting to my creative ideas.

As I caught myself doing this recently, I began to wonder how much is that impacting my creativity and photographic process. A significant part of the photographic process is observation and being present and observing things in the world. I began to wonder, is my smart phone causing my creative muscles to atrophy.

A recent trip to a big-box retailer taught me something interesting about my creative process. We were standing in line, and due to a product display blocking peoples view from two different directions, the line was having to merge similar to an on-ramp at a freeway. At one point, a couple ended up cutting us off. However, they felt they were in the right spot for the line. Rather than have a conversation about what was going on, they passive-aggressively turned their backs towards the rest of us in line and had a conversation about how rude it was for people to get in their way. They continue to push on other people's carts and make sure that everybody knew that they were next in line. What struck me as odd, was that they did not take the time actually to have a conversation with anyone. They chose to avoid the conversation rather than work to resolve any issues they may be feeling towards the rest of us.

This event made me think a lot about my creative process. I believe there are times in my process that I also become passive aggressive with what I'm doing or how I'm reacting to work. And just like the couple at the store, I frequently will avoid the conversation and rather stew in my own stories and issues around what's going on. I think this is very detrimental to my overall crazy process and likely detrimental to a lot of people's creative process.

Creativity is all about dealing with the unknown and uncertainty. And just like in the store sometimes lines will merge things will appear in front of us, and we have to determine how organ respond to those in a way that's going to make us more creative and more engaged with our work. In this week's podcast, we examine some of the roles and ideas of this passive-aggressive behavior can have towards our understanding of creativity in our creative process.

As we work our creative process we often time find ourselves stuck hitting the wall creatively. This week I was inspired by a Susan Sontag quote on the impact of making photographs of meaning and being so caught up in the act that we miss what is happening around us. Many times, in my work, I find myself struggling to find a way to get around my process behind the camera.

By understanding what can cause us to get stuck, we can hopefully find a way to scale the wall or find a way around it so that we can return to our natural creative state.

I have a couple of announcements to start this week's podcast. The week of August 21 through the 24th this film week at creative live. I am really excited to be one of the instructors. I will be teaching a black-and-white film class on August 22, and I will be teaching a large-format photography class on August 24. I hope you can attend both sessions. You can find out more at the creative live website.

I will also be speaking at the Northwest counsel for camera clubs the weekend of November 11. At their convention a be teaching two sessions on light room. One on the development module and then one on how to organize using collections and various tools in the library module.

The main subject for this week's podcast is creating assumptions. I have found my own creative practice that many times I make assumptions they end up costing me time, energy, and enthusiasm. while I think some assumptions are great. Such is the assumption that muscle memory will come back and help us what we need it most. Things like riding a bike or using our studio lights are examples of how muscle memory can quickly come back and allow us to perform a difficult task.

When I was growing up, and you heard something that sounded strange our weird, you had to either blindly accept it, research it at the library or test it yourself. As those stories passed from person-to-person, we eventually learned that the urban legend was something that some of us just accepted and other would challenge. The urban legend has grown up and now become clickbait and fake news. And, by fake news, I mean information that has no backing, factuality or research behind it.

A visit from some family inspired this week's podcast. My sister-in-law's family came to visit, and they have a little 2-year old. My brother-in-law and I were talking about being a dad, and he mentioned in passing how much advice they hear from people when it comes to raising their kid.

As we were talking, it occurred to me that much of the advice that they got was from people who didn't have children. Those people, like me, were only able to speak from knowledge gained from others. Over the course of the conversation, he mentioned that there comes the point where you just know what will work and won't work regardless of the advice. I realized that was wisdom when dealing with his kid.

In our creative practice, I think it is much the same. We can take in all sorts of knowledge, facts, skills, and whatnot, but in the end, if we don't move to some level of wisdom, it will be a hard creative road. It is the wisdom of our experiences in that allows us to be the artist we want to be. When we start to apply our understanding of the information we have assimilated into something new and unique to our creative practice do we learn how to be ourselves in our creative practice.

There is nothing wrong with working hard to gain knowledge, but in my experience, at some point, you have to start to let go of all that knowledge as power and then move forward to really becoming a creative voice for your own story.

In this week's podcast, we take a look at how some of the concepts that are used in cinematic storytelling can be applied to still photography.

Photography and cinema have always been joined at the hip. While one is an expanded scope for time, sound, and movement, they are still visual mediums that are about the capture of light. As I looked back at some of the movies I have seen in my life, I realized that there was a way to think about some of the storytelling elements in those movies and how they could be applied to my images.

Understanding how directors, actors and cinematographers, use light, costumes, color palettes, assumptions of viewers, and editing of the film all have an enormous impact on our experience of connecting with the story. By diving deep into a few examples, we can see how using some of those same concepts might be able to explain and jump start some of our work as photographers.

This week's podcast is all about answer some listener's questions that have been sent in over the past few months. I grabbed some of the more interesting and most asked questions and spend some time answering them.

The topics include finding new photographers, favorite papers to print with, challenges facing photographers, my current project work and finally how to critique a bad photograph.