PixelatedImage Blog

May’s a special month around these here PixelatedImage parts. On May 11 my much-anticipated book will be released. So this month I’m feeling generous! I’ve made 2 wallpaper choices for you- Blue and Green – in both 2560×1600 and 1280×853. And as a bonus there’s a tiny little star on May 11 to remind you that the book gets released into the wild on that day. This was shot at dawn in northern Bangladesh.

BLUE 2560×1600 – 1280×853
GREEN 2560×1600 – 1280×853

The Big Q
“David, I’m an avid reader of your blog. Further, I cannot wait to get  my hands on your book as a source of inspiration. I’ve read all of the  available excerpts and am hungry for more.

I’m curious, how much directing do you have to do when out shooting.  In other words, are all of the scenes in your book, or in general,  candid, or are some of them posed? This might make a good blog post,  unless of course, it’s already in the book. It’s just something that  I’ve wondered about when I see great photography with pictures of  people in it.” – Paul.

The Big A
First, thanks for the kind worlds, Paul. Frankly, I can’t wait to get my hands on the book either. I should be getting one of the first copies off the press and FedEx could be arriving at any moment with a book with ink still wet!

Yes, this is answered in some part in the book, but perhaps not so directly. I think my images are a real mixed bag of candids, and portraits. The candids and street photography are, by nature, un-directed. The portraits, well that’s a mix too but there are certainly times when I will direct things. If you look at my work for World Vision, those are commercial images. Real children in real situations, with real animals. But I do what I need to in order to get the right angle, the right light, and other considerations. For example, if a dress or article of clothing is torn in such a way that it is immodest, I’ll safety pin it. My work isn’t journalistic and the client has policies surrounding issues of child-protection, so I do what needs to be done to get an image which is beautiful, honest, and complies with the clients’ needs.

I think what is often forgotten is that almost any presence on our part, and especially when there is interaction, is a directoral interference of some sort. And beyond that we chose our angle, our lens, our apertures, etc. So I assume I’m involved in process that’s already pretty invasive in terms of the “Is this real or posed?” question. The answer, even when the image took some work to get, even some posing, is – I hope – yes. Yes, it’s posed, but also real. Increasingly I’m shying away from images that are so camera-aware, increasingly I’m chasing portraits, both formal and posed, where there are less smiles, finding other expressions, possibly deeper ones even.

I think what’s important to remember is that if you endeavor to create images that are honest, respectful, and kind, it’s hard to go wrong. It’s more a question of taste, and what you’re trying to do with your images. (Unless you’re a photojournalist, and then your ethics force you – I hope – to a tighter standard)

Beyond that initial question is one of that addresses the How. How do you work with subjects in different languages, from different cultures, and get them to collaborate with you? The answer is this: with patience, a sense of humour, and often great difficulty.

My experience is that people are pleasers and when you point a camera at them, no matter if it’s your uncle or a man in Africa, they’ll start re-arranging things – from the expression on their face, to the tea-cup on the table that was in the absolute perfect spot. You want them to move an inch, they move a foot. You want them to ignore you, they pose and give you a thumbs-up. I can’t solve this one for you. But here’s what you don’t do: you don’t freak out, get impatient, mutter things under your breath, or do anything but treat them with patience and kindness. Remember, if you turn to a friend and say “Aw nuts, he moved the tea-cup. I was really stupid to even suggest it” – the man who speaks no English probably still knows the word “stupid” – and he hears “mumble, mumble, mumble STUPID mumble mumble,” and thinks you mean him. Not cool. I learned this in a humbling fashion from a kind man in Africa.

Be careful. Be flexible. Be patient. The people we meet and photograph are not theme park mascots, they have the right to say no, and the right to mess up your photograph with the best of intentions.At the risk of sounding overly self-promotional, there’s a longer discussion of these kinds of issues in my book, if the subject interests you.

The Big Q is your chance to drop a question in my lap. As I get busier and busier, this may be your best chance to have the question answered. Leave your Qs in the comments.

On the Artist – Geek continuum I am closer to artisty-fartsy than I am to techno-nerd. My eyes gloss over when things get too technical. As a result, my weakness where this craft is concerned, is keeping my chops up and learning new skills. I’m big on vision and I talk ad nauseum about it, but craft matters and the sharper the tools of my craft the more equipped I am to serve that vision.

So when I saw that the Epson Print Academy was coming to Canada, I signed up for the Pro track and I’m pumped. There are two Canadian dates and they are: Toronto, March 21, so if you want to go, well, ya missed it. Vancouver, May 23rd. If you sign up in Vancouver and you want to get lunch together let me know, if we can get a handful of folks together I’ll reserve a table at Steamworks for lunch. More info – on the Print Academy, not lunch – HERE.

The other thing I’m doing to sharpen my tools is continue my study of light. Last year I really tucked in and began to study how light behaves, how it can be modified, and what that meant in terms of the aesthetics of the image. I made some forays into strobe and flash lighting, began to fiddle with Pocket Wizards more seriously. This year I am finally getting my act together. I’ve assembled a great location lighting kit, at the heart of which are 3 Canon Speedlights, 3 Pocket Wizard Flex TT5s and a MiniTT1. I’m going to be doing a couple little show and tell things in the coming month, but I want to say two things.

First, if you’ve not started to study light, you need to. It’s at the core of what we do and too many people neglect it. Took me 20 years to get to seriously studying it. That’s too long.There are some great books out there. Here’s a couple:

Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography

The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters (Voices That Matter)

The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes (Voices That Matter)

Second, the new Pocket Wizard system rocks. It is awesomeness x 1000 and I’ve double-checked the math on that. I can do wireless highspeed E-TTL flash. No more is the aesthetic of my image determined by the aperture required to get my shutter down under 1/200. And, the things I learn from Joe McNally’s teachings about flash, I can suddenly apply them in a way that makes sense to me. Being able to shoot at 1/6000 and f/1.2 and instantly adjust the flash EV compensation from right on the camera? Absolutely the most awesome thing ever. Some of you are rolling your eyes, but for me this is so awesome it makes me giggle like a schoolgirl and  that ain’t pretty but it should give you some idea how excited I am. When the tools work right and just get out of the way, the work of being creative becomes so much more intuitive and the images get better. I love it when that happens. For more info go straight to the source and look them up HERE.

Two small things, steps to improve my craft in the direction that doesn’t normally come naturally to me. You gotta be proactive about your education in this craft. I suggest making sure you read a couple books, take a workshop, find a mentor. Got a piece of gear you don’t use ’cause it scares the heck out of you? Time to pick it up and play. Have a weakness when it comes to using a particular lens or technique? Time to slay that dragon and get on with making some great images.

What are you doing this year to sharpen the tools? Share it with us, it might just inspire someone to try something they hadn’t considered.

In Vancouver and want to sharpen your tools, leave a comment about that too, I’m thinking about starting a get-together for just such a thing. A loose collective of photographers who get together to play, experiment, sharpen the tools. Whaddya think?

I’ve been lurking around the bloggy parts of the internet, listening in on conversations to which I am uninvited but in which my name gets mentioned often alongside the word “vision.” I hear lots of people inspired to chase their vision and express it more clearly. I also hear that some folks are just plain frustrated. Frustrated by all this talk of vision. Frustrated by trying to find their vision. Frustrated by trying to express it once they’ve “found it”.

Me too.

I sometimes talk of vision as though this stuff is the easiest thing in the world. Vision-Driven this and Vision-Driven that. I get the feeling that some folks feel left out – or worse, chastised – because they haven’t found their vision. I’m hoping the beginning parts of Within The Frame explore all this stuff with a little more clarity. Maybe not. So let me say a couple things here.

No one I know discovers their vision once and for all hiding under the cushions of the couch. It is a moving target, ephemeral, and the moment you see it in your peripheral vision there it is! Until you turn to look at it head-on, and it vanishes. It’s not easy. You’d be forgiven for cussing once in a while. Nothing wrong with being passionate about it.

I took a course in Rabbinic Thought in college. It taught me that the questions are often more important – usually more important – than the replies. That the root of the word “question” itself is the word quest. I think it’s so with vision – that the questions all this stuff raises do not get in the path of you finding your vision, they are the path. It is our photographs that are the attempt to respond to those questions. Of course we find it hard to put our vision into words, if we could do it so easily we’d have all picked up pens, not cameras.

I might have used this analogy before, but it bears repeating. Writers do not sit down, lasso a thought and then write it down. Another thought, another page. Some do. Most don’t. Most writers I know, the ones I’ve read, and I myself, sit down often – usually, even – with no clue what to say, nor how. We don’t think so we can write. We write so we can think. The writing is not something we do to merely record our creative thinking process. It is the process. I often sit down with no clue what the next words I will write are. The writing pulls them from me. It’s the same with photography. Or it is for me. The viewfinder is part of our process of thinking. The frame is our silent partner in finding and expressing our vision. That’s why it often takes several frames to get it right, why a shoot often undergoes an evolution until the elements fall into place. Sure, some of us visualize it all ahead of time, but the rest of us – the mortals – we usually wrestle our vision to the ground. And we don’t always win.

Look, if this was easy to put your finger on, to define it, how worthwhile would it be? We’re hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of little black cameras all looking at this world through hundreds of thousands of eyes.

Different vision.
Different passion.
Different things to say.
Different reasons for saying so.
Different obstacles to overcome in the saying.

So to the frustrated, let me just say this. Me too. This vision stuff is a pain in the ass. But ask any poet, novelist, songwriter, painter, if their vision comes to them in frequent epiphanies or through the hard labour of struggling. My money’s on the struggle. That’s why some of them go insane. Or turn to heroine. What is important is not that you have a handle on your specific vision of your specific subject, but that you’re asking the questions, engaging in the process. What do I think about this? What do I feel about it? How can I capture that in this tiny frame and these two dimensions?

It’s not math. It’s closer, I hope, to poetry. Your photographs won’t be better for figuring this stuff out; they’ll be better for wrestling with it. So knowing that, take a breath. Slow down. Don’t get bent out of shape. We aren’t curing cancer here. We’re writing visual poems. Ease up on yourself. Bitter, insane photographers make bitter, insane, visual poems. Remember those wierd Magic Eye posters from the early 90s? You look too hard and you never see the image emerge from the noise. Looking is not the same as seeing and sometimes you see better if you don’t try so hard.

With apologies to the goat for the rather undignified photo, but the little bugger kept jumping out of my hands. This was shot by my buddy Gary while shooting on location with a Maasai family in Kenya.

For a while I’ve been meaning to tell my story, so perhaps this Friday is as good a note to end on as any. I’m telling this in the hopes that it encourages others, not to showboat or grandstand. Fact is, there’s enough failure in my story to balance out the good stuff. Probably most of the good stuff came out of the failure, in fact. But as the posts that seem to resonate most deeply with the community here are the more introspective ones that acknowledge the difficulties of this craft and vocation, rather than gloss them over, I’m going to take that as my liberty to be honest. Don’t count on me taking the liberty to be short, though I’ll try.

I fell truly in love with photography when I was 14. I bought a friend’s beat-up Voigtlander range-finder at a garage sale and started spending all my money on film. Thank God it had a fixed lens or I’d have spent every penny on optics instead. A year later my mother gave me leather satchel with a Pentax Spotmatic, a couple lenses, and a Linhoff tripod – the massive size of which was inversely proportionate to it’s stability. A year after that a neighbor gave me his development gear in exchange for a couple nights of babysitting. Took a photography class at school to gain free access to the enlargers and paper. And somewhere in there fell head over heels down the rabbit hole of photography. Wanted nothing more than to take photography in college, spin on my heels with a diploma in my hands and march straight to the offices of National Geographic and get to work.

Instead I went to theology college. Somewhere along the way some sense had crept into my brain and convinced me that if I did photography as a career I’d lose the passion. This isn’t the case for some, but I know it would have been for me. Fact is, back then I was in love with photography but not yet with any sense of what I wanted to photograph or why. The stories and moments I could capture with passion – I had no idea what those were. I shot everthing. Ducks. Flowers. More ducks. Artsy macros of driftwood. Friends in an ill-fated band. In between the stuff I shot “just because” I got glimpses of my vision coming to the surface. I was on the Amazon for a summer and with a borrowed Nikon shot some images that stuck with me. I went to Russia for a winter, came home with a few images that kept poking at me with hints of what I really wanted to be shooting.

I left theology school, degree in hand, eager to change the world. Became a comedian. Go figure. Spent twelve years on stages internationally, making audiences laugh, learning about communication. Studied sleight of hand and illusion, learned about perception. And all the while, in the background, my love for photography grew. Some years were better than others, but it was like an incubation, a sabbatical. And then one day I picked it up again. The time was right. And my gear was all immediately stolen. I replaced it, got bored, traded it all in and on a lark bought a Canon Powershot A65, that with a Ti PowerBook and a copy of Photoshop dragged me, wide eyed and giggling, into the digital revolution. Suddenly the whole creative process was in my hands again. We went to the Canadian maritime provinces, my little camera mounted ridiculously on the top of a large Manfrotto tripod. Half way through the trip I knew I was hooked. I knew I could write the trip off if I opened a photography business. Knew if we scrimped a little on the trip I’d have enough to buy a DSLR when we got home.

So fast forward through the purchase a Canon Digital Rebel, then a 20D, and to the day I got off a plane in Port Au Prince, Haiti. I’d gone to see the work of an organization through whom my wife and I sponsor a child; they asked me to consider advocating their work from the stage in my comedy work. At the last minute they saw my photography and asked if I’d stay a little longer and shoot for them. It was among the most incredible weeks of my life.

I went down as a comedian who loved photography. I flew home a photographer. I had discovered the stream of my work. The constant that was present in all the work I’d ever done and loved – travel, culture, children. I returned home with a plan. It wasn’t elaborate. Heck, wasn’t so much a plan as the seed of an idea. A what-if.

What if I could shoot for a group like World Vision? What if I could create images the NGOs working with children and families could use in advocacy and fundraising, to tell more compelling stories? What if…

That was my plan. A crazy what-if based on nothing more than a sense of calling fueled by my natural idealism. After nearly 12 years of comedy I was getting tired. I was also feeling like I was at the end. That the season for that was over and something else lay ahead. I started a blog to document my transition. My business plan was ludicrously hollow. My market research was nil. Everything I’ve ever preached about making it in this business, I learned after the fact. At the time I had one thing – a passionate sense of calling combined with a renewed love for my craft. That was it. In January of 2005, I went to Ethiopia to work on a cookbook with some friends. That trip solidified it all for me. And then I went home and was forced into bankruptcy. That’s a different story for a different time but should give you a clue to why I am so preachy about not going into debt.

A year later I got my first assignment with World Vision and I finally, after over 15 years of stalling on the dream, ended up where I had wanted to be in the first place. Some dreams are hard-fought,  mine was just long-fought.

I’m going to lay my cards on the table here and tell you what went through my mind. Some of it will make no sense to you, some will contradict advice I’ve given. All I can say in my defense is that we all learn in different ways and my career has taken a decidedly different arc than the one your might take. So – two things:

First. I look at my career as a passion-driven, vision-driven process. I believe strongly in the notion of calling, that this is a vocation (from the Latin, vocatus, meaning to call or invite) for which I was created. That drives me, gives me purpose. But I also believe the line between so-called professional and so-called amateur are increasingly blurry. I didn’t make the career transition because I could, but because my soul was bored and suddenly found something that lit it on fire again and I couldn’t not follow the flame. I hope that makes sense. Passion will take you a long, long way. It will fuel your persistence and tenacity. It will give you the strength to do unlikely things and ask audacious questions of strangers and heroes. It will keep you up dreaming and scheming at night. I think I knew that when I was 18. I think that my hiatus and my career in comedy was what I needed to find my passion and calling. I worked on my craft through those years, sometimes more than others, but it was often without heart.

Second, when I made the decision to do this I followed the only model I knew – the one I’d learned in show business. I worked my ass of on my craft, connected with every photographer I could, read books, shot like a man on fire. I wanted to have credibility but had none, so attached myself to sponsors who did. I found a few that liked my work and were willing to take a chance on me. Why? Free gear? Hardly. It was because I’d learned that perception is reality and if people saw that I was sponsored by LowePro, for example (which I was at the time) then the reputation of LowePro rubbed off on me a little bit. I found clients – any clients, even freebies, to shoot for – to sharpen my edge and develop a client list. I put up a website that looked like I knew what I was doing. I did everything I could to be perceived as  the photographer I believed myself to be. I said nothing misleading, nothing that didn’t reflect the reality of who I was. I just chose the most powerful tools I could.

Etc. One gig leads to another. One contact to another. You experience joys and defeats. You find people who believe in you, true fans who will champion your work, introduce you to colleagues, editors, clients. But this all comes back, not to how I got here, because I haven’t arrived, there is no magical place at which you find yourself to have arrived, but to why. Why drives how. I got here, wherever “here” is, because of my passion. Where is here? Here is a place in which I have work I love, can daily do something that my soul feels good about, that I can hit the pillow having done something I love and already scheming about the next something. Whether I am seen to have succeeded or failed at any one endeavor is not the point. The point is that I had a chance to do it, to create, and in so-doing to fan my creativity to flame, to feed my soul, to stretch my mind, to make a difference and leave – I hope – the world a little better for my being here.

Life is too short. A vapour. The end, regardless of your beliefs about what happens afterward, comes barreling down the road directly at us. You have to eat, you have to make good decisions, but unless you do what you do with all the passion in your heart, it’s not worth it. This might sound desperately – foolishly! – naive and irresponsible, but if you’re a wedding shooter and you long to be in Africa shooting, then get to Africa and shoot. if you’re so tired of headshots that the idea of one more forced smile or brooding, tortured artist look makes you curl into a ball, then stop. Stop it now. Find and follow your passion. Find a way to make it work. I have the luxury of believing, hard as it is at times, that God is in charge of this whole looney thing and if He calls me to something, gives me the gifts to do it, and I do absolutely everything I can to make it happen, then He darn well better do the rest. And if I fail, or if God fails to do His bit, and I go down in flames, then I’ll have had a good run and done the one thing I’ve endeavored to do since I was an idealistic teenager reading Henry David Thoreau – avoided leading a life of quiet desperation. Though knowing me it would have been a life of noisy desperation with lots of talking.

Whether laying my cards out like this is a good idea or not remains to be seen. Might scare some of you off. For others it might disabuse you of the notion that I’m so much further along than you are. What I hope it does is fire you up, give you the courage to find and follow your passion.

Jeepers that was long. Sorry. At least you have all weekend to read it, right? Have a great weekend, y’all.

The Big Q
With all the traveling you do, you must get a lot of crud on your gear. What would be your gear cleaning routine? I’m often troubled from shooting at family dinners (kids spit, pets lick, food splatter…), and also blown dirt from coastal areas. Often a big air blower bulb doesn’t dislodge anything that’s been wet, but i hate to wipe filters and bare glass (often forced to take filters off at night) from fear of scratching the coating, even with 3M micro fibre cloths. What should I be doing? What would you do?

The Big A
Well, first of all, what I do and what you (or I) should do, are two different things. Some of you aren’t going to like this. In fact it reminds me of a conversation I had with Karl Grobl recently. We were laughing about the difference in ways that hobbyist and professionals treat their gear and this exact thing came up. Truth is, we generally don’t treat our gear so well. We protect it, but we don’t baby it. When I’m at home I clean my gear with canned air, inside and out. I know, I know. Some of you are gasping, muttering oaths and curses. But my gear is to be used and I use it well. I don’t own a lens pen or lens brush. I own several lint-free cloths, a rocket blower and an Arctic Butterfly sensor brush, and that’s it. Can’t even tell you when the last time I used the Arctic Butterfly was.  Of course looking at one of my 5D sensors you can tell that this is the case and prompted by this question I’ll dig it out and give it a proper cleaning, might even pack it up and send it to Canon for a fill cleaning and lube.

Don’t get bent out of shape about this sensor stuff. I’m sure if you try really hard you could damage the thing, and I don’t suggest you lick off the grime, but photographers have been fighting dust forever and we’ll keep fighting it. Get too bent out of shape about it and you’re really fussing about the wrong thing. Blow it out, swab it off, move along. I wipe my lenses with a cloth but have wiped them with everything from a t-shirt to a kleenex. Again, I know, and I’ll probably get kicked out of NAPP for saying so, but I have yet to scratch a coating. I put the highest quality B+W filters on the front of my lenses when it’s really crappy out, and that helps.

The Visible Dust products work well and there’s a new one I want to try called Dust-Aid.

Several months ago a safari guide named Ryan Snider contacted me about being a guest instructor on a safari in Kenya. Ryan runs socially responsible safaris and grew up in Africa. At the time I had just returned for a too-short week among the Maasai and was eager to go back. And now I am, and you can come with me.

This is not a workshop, it’s a safari. Everyone that comes will be at a different place photographically so my role will be a more informal, organic one as a teacher and guide. Sure y’all have to share me, but it’s like coming on safari with your own photography coach. And if you’re not worn out, we’ll spend evenings talking about your images and how to make them better. If that appeals to you, take a look at the website. We’ll be staying in some fantastic places, and being a socially responsible safari there will be photographic opportunities on offer that you won’t find on other trips.

I’m not running this trip, but the information page is on my website. The trip is run through Able Travel and they’ve got years of experience doing this kind of thing. If the idea of spending 10 days with me sounds like fun, check it out. Americans, note that all prices listed are in CAD, so you’re getting a heck of a deal for an African safari.

Would love to see you there. If interested please contact the travel agency directly but I’d love to hear if you’re coming, so drop me a line too.

See you in Nairobi!

As a follow-up to last week’s series on blogging for photographers, here’s a list of the blogs I look to as a standard. They’re mostly personal blogs with solid traffic, unique voices and good content. A number of you sent suggestions that included your own blog and I encourage everyone to go back to the comments on that post HERE – to see more suggestions both in regards to blogs and to hosting and blog platforms. Some excellent reader feedback there. So please don’t take offense if your blog isn’t in the list below, this is a pretty cursory list of solid, more established blogs that I hope will inspire you as you build your own blogs to reflect your purpose and passion. Being on this list means something, but not being on it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Hope that makes sense.

M.D. Welch – http://www.depth-of-field.com/blog/

Scott Kelby – http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/

Matt Brandon – http://www.thedigitaltrekker.com/blog/

Gavin Gough – http://www.gavingough.com/blog

Joe McNally – http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/

Moose Peterson -http://www.moosenewsblog.com/

Chase Jarvis – http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/

Strobist – http://strobist.blogspot.com/

Tewfic El-Sawy – http://thetravelphotographer.blogspot.com/

Drew Gardner – http://photography-thedarkart.blogspot.com/

Bruce Percy – http://www.brucepercy.com/blog/

Zack Arias – http://www.zarias.com/

David Nightingale – http://www.chromasia.com/iblog/index.php

Kirk Tuck – http://visualsciencelab.blogspot.com/

Jessica Claire – http://www.jessicaclaire.net/

Jasmine Star – http://www.jasminestarblog.com/

Guy Tal – http://guytal.com/wordpress/

Kathleen Connally – http://www.durhamtownship.com/

Dane Sanders – http://blog.danesanders.com/

Did I miss someone that you think is an absolute must-have on the list? Doesn’t surprise me. The Internets are a big place. Drop it into the comments.

As far as hosting goes I want to plug ETWebHosting again. (Click here to go to their WordPress hosting page) They also own DomainSmarty, so the process of registering your name and hosting it are seemless – I don’t like complications and doing it all in one place with a company that has brilliant customer service is my kind of service. The company is owned by my buddy, we’ve travelled around the world together, he’s photographer friendly, and unlike most of the companies I’ve dealt with or heard horror stories about, his company doesn’t speak geek to us mere mortals.  If you’re a pro, or plan to be, having a dedicated name for  your blog – like, for example, Moose Peterson’s MooseNewsBlog.com – is way better than moosepeterson.blogspot.com – it’s just one step closer to projecting a fully professional image. Of course there are exceptions. David Hobby’s Strobist site is as plain jane as it gets and the name is still strobist.blogspot.com, but his content is so good and so well known that it trumps other considerations.

I also want to encourage you to spread the word about your blog. If you take the time to write consistently, then take the time to publicize it. Connect to others, share the love, get on Twitter and direct traffic to your great content and images.

If I can answer questions related to blogging as a photographer, I’d love to. I know that some of the other readers will have some excellent feedback to, so drop the questions into the comments and together we’ll do what we can to get you blogging and doing it well. Now take a moment and visit a few of the sites above.

Easily the proudest moment in my professional life was reading the words Joe McNally wrote in the Foreword to my book, Within The Frame. The good folks at Peachpit/New Riders have just released that Foreword in a PDF format and it’s downloadable from their website be clicking HERE. Joe wrote the Foreword, Vincent Versace wrote the Afterword; if you’ve been wondering if the stuff in the middle is any good, then give this a read. If ya can’t trust Joe McNally, ya can’t trust anyone.

If you haven’t yet looked at the sample chapter, you can also download that HERE.

And finally, if you’re dying to get a signed copy, there’s more info on that HERE.

Within The Frame will be released 3 weeks from today, on May 11 and is available for pre-order now from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, or your favourite bookmonger.

I’m drawing on an ancient narrative for this one, but stick with me, I’m going somewhere with it.

My Jewish friends and family just celebrated Passover, a time of celebration and commemoration of the release of the Jewish nation from slavery in Egypt, thousands of years ago, under the leadership of Moses. God says let my people go, Pharaoh says  no, God wipes out every firstborn as the final act of an escalating series of plagues. Those spared, the ones whom the angel of death passed over, had the blood of a lamb smeared on the doorposts. Gruesome stuff and not the tidiest story to reconcile with my theology of love and forgiveness, but try as we do, theology ain’t tidy. Anyways, fast forward to the desert, the escaped Hebrews, likely close to a million strong, are now wandering aimlessly, and hungry. So God provides a food they call Manna, a word meaning “What the heck is this stuff?” Seriously, that’s what it means. Though I doubt the word “heck” is a literal translation.

Manna was a flaky food, and while it’s called bread, it seems that might only have been the closest thing to compare it to. God provides it daily. Enough for everyone. But there’s a catch. With the exception of the Sabbath they’re told they can’t store it. They have to trust that it’ll be there the next day. And the next. And the next. Eat it while you have it, because it turns putrid pretty quick.

I think there are some things in life, intangible things that come to us from beyond ourselves, that are meant to be exercised and used as we’re given them, with no stockpiling allowed. I think faith is like this, whether its object is God or other people. Love too. Hope, certainly. And creativity.

The more I study creativity, the more sure I am that the study of it leads to more questions than answers. It’s not a process that can be pinned down and dissected. It’s often unpredictable. And it doesn’t store well. We play by its rules or not at all. Creativity’s like manna. It comes from somewhere outside ourselves, a gift, and one that’s meant to be used, every ounce of it, without thought for tomorrow. Don’t pace yourself, don’t stockpile, don’t hoarde it. Creativity grows with the expenditure and shrinks with the hoarding.

So what does this mean to us? It means you don’t write three fluffy books when you can write one killer one. You don’t spread it thin. It means you use up your ideas as you get them. Got an idea that’ll work for this assignment but you were saving it, maybe to use for a personal project down the road? Don’t do it. Use it. Burn it like fuel, it’ll lead to a bigger fire and that personal project later on will take on a whole new life. By all means, save it, treat it like it’s not perishable, but it’ll turn to dust. Good ideas build on each other, lead to new ideas. But keep them in a box and even that idea fades away.

The creative life is about risks, not caution. About now, not later. And it’s about trusting that the creativity will be there when we need it. Don’t hold back.