All this waiting is messing with my head. I haven’t managed to do anything useful this whole holyday. I’ve been playing a lot with my phone though, which I also is writing this post on, but I really whish I could focus a bit more.
I need an autofocus for my brain.
Paul wrote a post linking to the “The cult of done manifesto” some days back.
I just wanted to comment a bit further on that. The manifesto lists 13 items, and in the spirit of the manifesto itself, it was done in 20 minutes because it had to be done.
Well, not all the items are that good, but there are some that resonates well with me.
Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
Done is the engine of more.
The funny thing, if you read through the comments to the original post, is how differently people interpret it, and react to it.
You got the people embracing it, which are typically the so called “creative” people. People doing arts or working in some sort of media. I have no problems seeing why they embrace it. Then there are the cranks that think it is stupid. I typically see the engineers there. Many of them claim this is just an excuse for lazy people not to work, and they are hard at work fixing the mistakes of these laze bastards. A couple of them claim to work in the aerospace industry, thinking they make a stronger point.
First of all, I don’t know if you’ve heard the old saying; “We could use the absolute best quality, unfortunately the aerospace industry has settled with aerospace quality”. Even aerospace is limited by time, budget, ignorance and incompetence. Like any other industry.
I think the false assumption some peaple make, is that they equal “done” with “not on my desk anymore”. This is in my opinion not true. The last one is not good, while the first one is. for me, being done means I have completed a task at the required quality standard, and if I failed to reach that, to acknowledge the fact and communicate that to those affected by it. It does not mean that I pretend to have completed the task just to ship it of to be someone elses problem. That is, in my opinion, not being done.
I am an engineer who has spend several years in the semiconductor industry, making integrated circuits, and I have spend quite a few years piloting aircrafts and maintaining my own sailplane. I think the ideas presented above is universally applicable to these activities, as to photography or any other artsy stuff.
Resistance seems to be the topic around my usual blogosphere hangout these days. I thought I should stay off the topic, but hey, why should I be the one sticking out.
I think, but I may be wrong, that it started over at Gordons blog in this post about Resistance. I have seen other posts on Paul Lesters blog, Doonster, Paul Butzi and uuuuhm, a lot more. I think you should be able to find most of them from the links I’ve provided.
Well, to the point. I too, like most people I suppose, also suffer from this. The natural instinct to avoid doing something that seems hard, or that I am not confident in doing. The thing is, when I’m out walking, or doing some other form of physical activity, everything seems to be possible. Even so when I’m out photographing. If I have a slow day, and I can’t really find anything good, I can just speed up my pace, and let the world fly by faster. That usually helps. I guess I look like those Canon tv adds, you know those where some people where dropping out of the sky with an EOS 400D or something and immediately started to litterarily run around taking pictures. I’ll admit that it is not the best way to cover the subjects. After all, it’s hard to be very observant when the pulse is punping hard, but it gets the creativity juices flowing, so why not.
I guess I should have a threadmill in front of my desk at work as well 
The good feeling fades fairly quickly when I get back home an sit down, but some of the ideas and inspiration remains for a while.
So if you have problems with “Resistance”, try physical exersize. And even if it doesn’t work, the side effect isn’t that bad either
A couple of weeks back I visited a small sales exhibition here in Oslo at Gallery View. The artist was Paida, and the exhibition was called “Tinn | Vann”
You can read more at the Photo Exhibit blog, and also look at some pictures.
This podcast is just about all the irrelevant stuff that happened that day.
And last, you get 3 good music tips, all about coffee.
As I was wandering back and forth in my home office/studio just now, thinking, it dawned on me why I don’t like doing photography as projects.
First I want to say that this is something that applies to me, and it is not a universal truth.
Anyway, I find that when I set a well defined goal, and a time frame to do it in, I tend to think very linear. I make a plan to get to the goal, and figures out how to get there. The problem is that this analytical approach is putting my creativity to a full stop. A plan like this usually involves doing things in a certain sequence, and most likely, some boring activity comes first. The thing is that the creativity is usually at its peak when an idea is conceived, so that should not be the time I spend on boring preparations. Also, I have a tendency to stall on a boring task, trying to fool myself into believing that my reward for finishing this task is that I can go out and play ( = take pictures). An last is the feeling that I should not spend my time on photographing other topics when I have committed to a project, which effectively puts a lid on the important task of nurturing the creativity.
On the other hand, if I don’t define a project, I do whatever pleases me, postponing the boring stuff until it is absolutely needed. Suits me much better. I can let my thoughts and inspiration jump around more freely, and focus on what feels naturally for as long as it I like.
Projects to me is like a long trench, where creativity is a scheduled activity some time in the future, often to be reached at a bad day. Not defining projects is like chasing butterflies on an open field.
I prefer the open field.
Trees reflected in water is an on going fascination for me. I’ve been on and off the topic for as long as I have been photographing.
So, what’s the new year going to be like?
The small stuff first. I haven’t been posting much lately, and there are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, my day time job has taken a slight turn for me, and a good turn it has been. I have been more and more involved in new, and much more interesting topics than I used to work with (the new is functional verification of digital microelectronics). There has been much new stuff to learn, and quite a lot of interesting work to do. A couple of years back, I was an analog designer, and now I have become more the equivalent of a software designer, and to my surprise, it suits me much better. I guess this priority will slide a little bit back once I get more routine and expertise in the field, but right now I haven’t got all that much time for photography.
As part of my new tasks at work, I also need to organize some training sessions. I could just make some PowerPoint slides, and do the usual presentation stuff, but the topic is of a practical nature. It involves writing some software code, and using some software tools. So I started to think screen casts. An excellent way to create self training on software tools. I just got myself a decent mic, and started to practice. I have done lots of class room teaching, both as a sailplane instructor and some photograph stuff, and I have taught swing dance for several years, but this is completely different. It is really difficult to talk to a mic, and get it to sound good. Not to mention I have to do it in English. I’m Norwegian, remember. Working in a large international company, we have employees from all around the world, and that is just in the Oslo office,. Imagine what kind of people is working all around the world Maybe I try to do some audio on photography just for practice, we’ll see. Even if it is difficult to talk to a mic, it is also very liberating to talk instead of writing some times.
The big change, and this one I haven’t talked about on this blog at all, is that me and my wife is expecting our first child in the beginning of April. I have no illusions about not letting it change my life. I guess there will be at least a couple of months where it will consume all attention, but once the dust has settled just a little bit, I can pick up the camera again. Well, I guess the camera will be red hot the first months, but not photographing my usual subjects.
So, my priorities are changing a bit, and even though it’s not bad, I feel a bit bad about it. First of all,this has not been a good thing for the “Better in print” initiative I did a while back. Second, I haven’t had time or energy to involve myself in the “Pictures” group. Sorry about that Robert, I hope to get back some day. Obviously, getting a son is a long term project, but I think my job will occupy less hours a couple of months from now.
To finish this off, I know I have a few regular readers, at least the IP addresses indicates that. Some of my readers, I know quite well. At least half of my blog roll is commenting on my blog from time to time, and there are some that I should have added to my blog roll, but I haven’t yet. I think I’ll do that right away. I would really really love to get a word from some of you readers that haven’t written a comment yet. Maybe you have a blog yourself, or a web page or flickr page. When someone is commenting my blog, I always look at the link they leave behind, and it’s great fun.
So, a happy new year to all of you, I’m pretty sure mine will be.
Kjell
I just wrote a small series of posts about working with projects, the first one is here. Apparently, these posts has drawn some attention since Paul Butzi mentioned it in a post on his blog, and now over at Photostream in this post by Colin. The funny thing about Colins post is that he placed a quote by me, “I want to push my creativity, not my productivity” onto his list of “Words not to lose“. This list is crowded with famous photographers and other artists, and it feels a bit strange to be mentioned on the same page as these people. It’s like being dumped in to an embassy cocktail party wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
