PixelatedImage Blog

This is December’s wallpaper. Shot 100 metres from my door and just inches from the Pacific Ocean. It’s a little more abstract than I usually go for. What can I say, reading too much Freeman Patterson and playing too much with my new Lensbaby.  This image is 1280×853 (click it for the larger file). If you want a larger one, click HERE for a 2560×1600 version.

I shot this last week while out walking, trying to stir the paint on my creativity. One camera. One Lensbaby Composer. 60 minutes walking by the ocean.

One of the things I am most constantly grateful for is being able to make a living in a creative field. The flipside of course is working at the mercy of inspiration and creativity – two commodities that are, at times, worryingly sparse. I can’t be the only creative that feels a need to use creativity-management techniques.

Here’s my top three.

Focus on the Positive
I remember once telling someone I hated a particular movie. She told me I was being negative. I replied, Ok, I’m positive I hated the movie. Not what she meant, apparently.

When it comes to being creative I do not work well in the negative and on the right day, folks, can I ever find the negative. I can give you a million reasons a shot won’t work, a piece of gear isn’t ideal, the lens I have is wrong, the light is crap, and that – in point of fact – the world is conspiring against me.

But creativity doesn’t do so well in those conditions. Creativity needs a constant flow of possibility, and negativity stops that flow with No instead of Yes. If you’ve ever done theatre sports or improv you know this – when people go with the flow and say yes, work with the given scenarios, it develops a life of it’s own. When they say no, they stop the whole process dead in its tracks.

So instead, go with it. Natural lighting is harsh? Create images with a starker look, use the opportunity to use your reflectors, or find some shade. Lens isn’t creating the look you want? Use this as a chance to experiment with a new look. Whatever the challenge, getting frustrated puts me into a decidedly non-creative space and then I’m useless to solve the problem creatively because I’ve killed the one thing I have going for me – creativity. So role with it, refuse to get side-swiped by your frustration – find a way to go with the current rather than fight it.

Find Your Space
Creative people do not work in all spaces equally. For some their best creative space is at a coffee shop somewhere, or a park, a certain room of their home, or corner of their office. For some that space is not a place at all but a time – early morning, late at night. And for others still that space is a set of conditions – some work better with music, some with coffee, still others – particularly french poets -  under the influence of opiates, syphilis, and absinthe. I recommend the music and coffee, myself.

Whatever conditions work best for you it’s good to be conscious of them. It’s also good to try not to allow your creativity to be defined by them. Discovering why you work more creatively in a certain space will allow you to harness your creativity in broader and broader spaces. I’ve recently discovered that my best creative space works, in part, due to solitude. But the reason the solitude helps is the lack of pressure and expectations from others. Just discovering this has made it easier to be at my most creative even when others are around – I just need to control the voices and inputs, to not allow myself to give them heed. I can’t explain it much more than that, so I hope this is resonating with some of you enough that you can do something with it.

Give Yourself Constraints
I’ve written about this before and the more I live and work reliant on creativity the more I believe it to be true: creativity works best within certain boxes, not in a lack of them. Read more HERE if you’re interested, but for now let me suggest an exercise. The next time you are feeling jammed up creatively, put all the fancy zoom lenses and gadgets aside and put one lens – a Lensbaby or Fisheye, or crappy old plastic 50mm – on an old body and go to the park and play. Or shoot something more serious but limit yourself to one optic. If you always shoot longer optics, put your widest on. If you always shoot vertical, shoot horizontal.

Problem solving works best when you have an actual problem, creativity works best when it has something about which it needs to be creative. That can come most easily through a lack of options. And aside from pushing you to use that creative capacity you’ve been blessed with, it will also be good training for the times you work for others and limits are not chosen by you but imposed upon you by your client, the location, the models, the weather or any other of the myriad things in life that lie without our control.

Creativity is a beautiful thing but when it comes to making  a living from it, the more you understand how it works for you, the better. Got a favourite creative exercise or “out” when things get uninspired? Leave a comment, share the lovin’.

Have a great weekend.

American Thanksgiving generally sneaks up on me, in part because I’m Canadian and we do it earlier in the fall, and in part because it’s just too close to Christmas for any sane person to have a holiday, so every year it takes an American client to remind me they won’t be there in the morning. It snuck up on me again. And because I have so many US readers – happy thanksgiving y’all.

I’m a big fan of thanksgiving, though less a fan of the reality that much of our society spends the rest of the year living in ingratitude. That we need to actually set a day aside to do be thankful tells me we lost our compass a little. Still, when it happens, is even forced on us, it’s a needed blessing.

I’m deeply grateful for the friends and family I have – they are my greatest riches. I’m grateful for the career and calling that I have – to be able to spend my days doing meaningful work that I love, and once in a while to be doing it in India or Africa or some other far-flung shore, that’s a blessing. I could be in a cubicle, or, uh, juggling. I’m grateful that I’m healthy, that the roof over my head doesn’t leak. I’m grateful for the smallest of blessings, knowing that not one of them is guaranteed. And I’m grateful for this craft that I love and the people who so graciously allow me to teach and pass along my passion for it, so thank you to you for being part of that.

Gratitude opens our eyes in ways far more important than photographically, and if that only happens once a year, it’s a good start.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

I’ve been mulling this one over for a long, long time. Mostly it’s spurred by a curiosity to know why so many photographers are such lousy designers. I know they are because I see their websites and business cards and they make my head spin so hard I usually have to sit down and kern some fonts just to make it all stop. Occasionally even that is not enough and I am forced to put on a black turtleneck and chant the name of Charles Eames or Gustav Eiffel over and over again. But this is not about that.

You should study graphic design. We all should. Not so we become better designers, though that would be nice and would end the scourge of crappy websites that is a blight on the earth, but so we become stronger photographers with a more intentional sense of composition. Also, black turtlenecks are awesome.

Design is very like photography at it’s core. In fact, learning the fundamentals of design in general, and graphic design specifically, will help your photographic composition immensely. After all, both are largely concerned with arranging elements within a frame in a way that will guide the eye towards the desired focus, along a relatively predictable path. Both have as their goal the communication of some message, thought, or emotion, through a visual, two-dimensional, language. And whereas photographers seem much more haphazard about all this, designers have no such luxury – they are given elements and it is their task to combine the forms to fit the function.

Want to hone your composition skills? Get a primer on graphic design, become a student. Learn about alignments and lines and their relationships to the frame. Learn about balancing elements. Learn about the interplay of shapes. There’s alot to the craft of realizing your vision photographically, much of it you’ll only learn by shooting many, many frames. But this is one exercise that’ll pay off in spades, I promise.

This month’s Photoshop User magazine is the usual excellent content, but with the addition of an article I wrote on Vision-Driven Workflow. It’s the featured article in the Lightroom Section. I’m not sure if this makes it a must-read or the one issue you can just skim over, but there you have it. Consider yourself warned.

If you’re not a NAPP member, ahem, you should be. This same issue also features Scott Kelby’s Gift Guide – so if you’re looking for ideas for your favourite photographer, Scott’s guide is a good one.

I know others have linked to this, but in case you limit your blog time and haven’t seen it – check out THIS POST at Gavin’s place about the Magnum blog’s list of advice for young photographers. While you’re at it, check out THIS POST at Pixsylated about high-speed flash sync. It’s excellent. I’m increasingly open to the idea of playing with my strobes while in the field, and it’s this kind of info that keeps me from tossing the darn things into the rubbish bin entirely. And David Hobby’s STROBIST too. If you loathe your strobe, you need to get over to STROBIST and get in on the lovin’.

Think Tank Photo just keeps cranking out the hits. I got an email from Brian at Think Tank Galactic HQ last week telling me they’ve updated their already excellent bags. This LINK will take you to the page with the three new bags – they’ve updated my favourite bag of all time, the Airport Addicted, as well as the Airport Acceleration and the Airpot Antidote. Key upgrades include some re-organizing of the internal space to give you more space in the smallest airline-compatible bags possible, as well as new security cables the roller bags have but until now the backpacks have not.

My trip to Kenya put me onto some re-fitted Air Canada planes and folks, even if you get your heavy over-sized bag past the gate agents, the overhead bins are getting smaller. My Airport Security was a tight, tight fit. Really tight. There was sweating involved. I’m thinking the new Airport Acceleration will be just the key for getting it all onto an international flight without having to admit defeat and gate-checking my precious gear.

I’m hoping to do a solid review of the new design as soon as I can get my hands on one of these, but in the mean time I’m relying on extensive experience with many of their other excellent products when I tell you that if you’re looking for a bag along these lines, you can’t do better than Think Tank when it comes to quality and excellence of design.

The image above is a comp I put together. I tried as best as I could to scale them all correctly to each other, but please check the Think Tank site for exact specs, and don’t forget to verify your airline carry-on limits before you travel.

I nearly forgot to do this until keen reader, and darn fine photographer, Tim Toole, gently reminded me to get my ass in gear. So I enlisted Tim to pick a number, which I would then divide by 3. Of course, Tim didn’t know that part, just to keep it fair. Thanks Tim. Anways all that complicated mathmatical wrangling resulted in a random winner. Or a non-random winner, chosen randomly. Depending on how you look at it.

I’m pleased to announce the winner of last week’s giveaway, courtesy of BorrowLenses.com – that winner is Lisa from TLC Photography. Lisa, drop me an email and I’ll put you in touch with the kind folks at BorrowLenses and you can start planning your free rental.

I’ve got other sponsors lined up for some great future giveaways, so keep trying. I love connecting my readers with great products and services that contribute to making your vision a reality.

I’ll get back into the blogging groove shortly, for now you’ll have to settle for this update and the one I posted from Heathrow yesterday. Nice to be home. See you tomorrow.

It’s been an interesting trip. I passed out on the plane while flying to Heathrow, came too looking up at the lavatory door, thinking how much more comfortable the floor is than the seats in economy. Then I got up and did it all over again. The things I do for attention. They gave me oxygen and tea to for the nausea, but nothing for my bruised ego. I had lunch in London with my family, which is a rare treat indeed, then continued on to Nairobi and a 2 hour drive out of town into Masai country.

Gary and I spent the week bumping around the red-dust roads, meeting and photographing masai families and making faces at school children. Long days and the usual challenges of trying to make one’s vision line up with the creative brief and the actual situation in front of you. In broadcasting they say you should avoid working with animals and children at all cost, I have chosen to work with both. At the same time. With language barriers. While jet-lagged. It is, in short, way too much fun.

We spent a morning at a water project that World Vision Canada had funded, and to hear the stories of how the community has been impacted, how their lives have changed, and their children have stopped dying, is enough to snap you back into the reality of life for most of this planet. (Have I reminded you about the amazing World Vision Gift Catalog? It’s available in Canada, the US, and the UK, if not others as well…)

While gone my emails piled up, the Vision Collective gained momentum (and spam too, darn it), and I feel like I’ve been left behind. On the other hand, the BorrowLenses.com contest got some attention and coming home to this many emails and comments and ongoing conversations is like coming home to a party in my living room, and it’s exhilarating. But I’m tired, so feel free to stay, but I’m going to bed.

I’m writing this in Heathrow. I fly out in an hour, then home sweet home in about 12. It’ll take me some time to get images from the trip up, but in the mean time this is a snapshot I took to mark the end of our time in Kenya.  It’s my last shot of the trip, a quick portrait of a wonderful Masai woman who had given me a beautiful beaded necklace the evening previous. We’d spent a couple afternoons with this beautiful woman and her large family and I wanted to remember her face. I felt so at home with the Masai that leaving felt more painful than usual. Africa retains a very special place in my heart – somehow it always feels like going home to be there.

More to come. It’ll be good to be home. I’ll announce the BorrowLenses.com winner tomorrow. Ok, got a plane to catch. See you when I’m home.

In January I’ll be in several new locations as I fly around the world. The most time I will have in any one place will be 5 days, six nights. In short, I’ll be very pressed for time to shoot the locations I’ll be in. Never been to Hanoi? Where do you start to become familiar with the place? Lonely Planet? Sure. An image search on Google? Also good. But last week I discovered Google Earth and my pre-trip location-scouting will never be the same.

It’s not that I didn’t know about Google Earth, just didn’t bother to really dig around. But last week while I was doing some digging around in prep for the trip I uploaded Google Earth to my iPod Touch and played with it. It’s one thing to look at a map of, say, Hanoi. It’s another entirely to see it in colour satelite photographs, to see the river, see where the boats are, get a sense of scale and begin to literally map out a plan. I only played with it an hour but can see myself spending time in airport lounges poking around the back alleys and plazas of the places I am about to fly to, making final scouting decisions based on what I see with my eyes and not just the lines of a map.

If you’ve never played with Google Earth, you can download it to your computer, as well as get an iPod/iPhone app. Check it out HERE. The site isn’t sexy – it’s actually pretty uninspiring, but once you get moving around a new country or city on your iPod or iPhone, you’ll be in love.

Any other great location scouting tips, other than actually going there, which is the best scouting of all – feel free to leave a comment. Scouting, if photographers do it at all, can be the key to a successful shoot or a total, unmitigated, should-have-stayed-at-home waste of time.