Ed Schlotzhauer

An artists journey

Tag: creativity

  • Prolific Creation

    Prolific Creation

    Two schools of thought involve creating fast and frequently vs. being slow and deliberate. I argue that creating prolifically is the best path.

    Is creativity a limited resource? Do you have to be concerned about using it up? My belief is, no, it is unlimited, but it is not always ready to flow.

    But I have heard about artists who are burnt out, dried up creatively. Doesn’t that argue that creativity is limited? No, an anecdote doesn’t make a proof. I don’t know these people and I can’t and wouldn’t make any judgements about why their creative springs dried up. But I believe that is a personal problem, not the nature of creativity.

    Slow and deliberate

    Some types of art is slow by its nature. Sculpture is an example. Some painting techniques take weeks to produce a work. Some large installations take months or years to create.

    Well, then, these artists have no option except to create on a slow cycle, right? I suspect they do not wait long periods of time. Most artists are sketching and experimenting with ideas all the time. They may spend 6 months working on a sculpture, but many other ideas are bubbling with them at the same time.

    My friend Kevin Caron, is an excellent sculptor based in Phoenix. He is a multi-talented 3 dimensional artist. Some of his large sculptures take months to complete. But at the same time he makes jewelry and 3D printed works. I believe these smaller items serve at least 2 purposes: provide works of his at a lower price point that more people can afford, and serve as a creative outlet to help fill in the drought between big projects.

    Prolific

    Prolific just means doing a lot. It does not describe the quality or finish of any piece.

    Most artists I know are always working. They are sketching, even doodling. I am a photographer, so most (not all) of my sketching is done with a camera or the computer.

    Sketch with a camera? Yes. If I see something interesting I may take some frames of it, knowing that these will be thrown away because they are not quality. When looking at them later I may decide there really is something there. I will go back and “work” the scene to develop the real image. This often involves sketches from different angles and at different times. When I figure out the personality or gesture I think is interesting then I go for it.

    This is something I have the luxury of doing on my home turf. I can return to a subject at will. It is different when I am traveling. It’s now or never. It is a different creative process to try to sum up a scene and optimize it in a second.

    And sketching with a computer? Sure. I often go into Photoshop and play “what if” games. What if I take this subject and this texture and this color palette? What kind of results can I create? I am sometimes pleased with the results.

    Why be prolific?

    I believe creativity is a combination of the skill to do the work combined with some unidentifiable, unmeasurable thing we usually call the “muse”. This, supposedly, is the spirit of creativity that animates us.

    I believe there is a muse. I have no idea what it really is, but I believe creativity ebbs and surges unpredictably. If the muse is gone, you can barely do anything creatively. If the muse is with you it seem. like creative ideas are bubbling all the time.

    But I don’t believe we are helpless slaves of this spirit. Creativity is also something we develop as a skill. The more we practice it the more easily we can do it.

    Creativity favors the prepared mind. – Roy Rowan

    The harder you work, the luckier you get. – Anon

    You weren’t any good at driving a car until you put in hundreds of hours behind the wheel. You were not a star at any sport you ever played until you had practiced for hundreds of hours. You couldn’t even write until you had practiced it a lot. And as for people learning to play the violin – well that’s a special subject.

    A limited resource?

    Is creativity a zero sum game? Once we use it up is it all gone? No, I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.

    Creativity is like love: the more you give away the more you have. Don’t worry about running out. Your creativity may wax and wane, but you can’t use it up. I believe the more you use it the easier it flows.

    Conclusion

    If you want to be creative then practice. If you are a painter, go crazy sketching. Most will be junk. That’s not a problem. Try every way you can think of to put paint on a canvas. You will get more skilled with time. If you are a photographer, always have your camera and give yourself permission to use it. Take a lot of pictures. They don’t cost much to throw away. Make the camera an extension of your eye. Learn to use it without thinking. Make sure you can always get the result you wanted.

    Be a prolific creator. Do it more and more. Put in the reps. Practice, practice, practice. Then, when the muse shows up, she will find you prepared. It will make her happy and she will lead you to great things.

  • Down Time

    Down Time

    I’m just coming off a week of being too sick to work. The enforced down time seemed strange to me, since I’m never sick or not working. It was an interesting time to reflect.

    Not going into my studio for an entire week. That’s unheard of. Stuck at home, your mind goes to weird places.

    But did I get anything useful to share with you or am I just ranting?

    Filling the time

    There was, of course, the requisite TV binging. Well, watching the screen, large and small. [Opinions expressed are my own. Void where prohibited by law.] There is nothing useful to watch on TV or cable. There might be a few decent shows, but they are so broken up by commercials that it’s pure frustration.

    Netflix, Amazon, and iMovies have a lot of good shows and series. That was mainly where I got my movie fix. It was a good chance to catch up on movies I had been wanting to see, especially those my wife didn’t want to watch.

    Where’s the beef?

    I enjoyed the movies and am still watching them, but that became very unsatisfying. There was no substance. My mind craved something better for it. It was like going to the buffet and gorging on dessert. I needed meat, vegetables, salad, too.

    One excellent source of nourishment was Creative Live. It has a very good selection of quality instruction and inspiration for creatives and makers. I watched several courses, including some I had already seen before. Being able to watch in uninterrupted blocks is better than a few minutes at a time whenever you can grab it.

    Another focus in the time was a Selective Color workshop by Alain Briot that I’m trying to work through. It’s pretty dense material, but I’m determined to dig more into luminosity masking and color enhancement. I’m getting the luminosity masking pretty well, but the color enhancement is far behind. For one thing, the realist in me sometimes digs in and blocks me experimenting with extreme transforms.

    Old school

    The whole world isn’t video. I went back to browse some of my old books (remember them?) on various aspects of photography and art. Especially helpful were books by the distinguished Michael Freeman. He has a fantastic talent for communicating in writing. Being able to grasp a complex subject and make it understandable to other people is a real art.

    I even dug into a history book I am reading. For some reason this year I got curious about Pearl Harbor and picked the excellent book by Gordon Prange, “At Dawn We Slept“. Wow, there is so much here. Mr. Prange was a very diligent historian. You find out what the relevant players on both sides were thinking and doing almost minute by minute. This is going to take some time but I’m definitely going to finish it.

    Learnings

    Sorry, no blinding revelations from the mountain. I didn’t change my life much.

    I did, though, conclude it is healthy to have some down time occasionally. If you spend your days nose-down working on projects, marketing, whatever busy work we have to do, it is good to pull out occasionally to rest and regroup. Sometimes we have to disengage from the demands of the urgent and let your mind rest.

    How you do it is probably very personal. Having private time to think and meditate works for me. For some getting together with friends is what they need. That’s a great idea too, but being sick for the week prevented that. Or schedule yourself into a retreat or a spa. We all have our notion of how to recharge.

    So I’m going to start scheduling down time (without the sickness).

    Try it! Let me know what you think!

  • Gestalt

    Gestalt

    No, not Gesundheit. Gestalt psychology is a a system that looks at things as a whole rather than just parts. It goes for the “big picture”.

    What does a relatively obscure European psychology theory from the early 20th century have to do with anything I have been discussing here? Quite a lot, actually. One of the famous summaries of Gestalt principles is “The whole is different than the sum of its parts.” I believe this is profoundly true for many things, especially photography.

    Proponents of Gestalt included notables such as Immanuel Kant, Ernst Mach, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Actually knowing who they were is not important, just that you have probably heard the names. It is interesting to me that the theory developed as a reaction to the prevailing trend of the day to break things down to the smallest possible parts. Something that still happens with some people to this day.

    A brief explanation of Gestalt

    A simple explanation of Gestalt is that the human mind makes patterns, it completes fragmented shapes to make wholes, it extends dots to see lines, etc. We are designed to complete pictures. The following figure shows an example of this. It is called the Kanizsa triangle. The Gestalt principle of closure is illustrated.

    Kanizsa Triangle

    Almost everyone sees 2 equilateral triangles in it. There are actually no triangles. Our brain “closes” the straight line segments to see one triangle and we “close” the shapes of the cutout circle segments (Pac Man?) to see the other one.

    Other Gestalt principles include similarity, proximity, continuity, and common regions. I’m not going to go into them here. I have no illusion of this being a course on psychology.

    Examples

    My point is that that these principles are real and common to most people. They are used by designers and artists all the time to guide our perception of images. Here are some examples from my library. They were not shot consciously thinking about Gestalt psychology, but they show some things that trigger my mental library because I have learned over time that they work.

    Implied lines

    Here you see the shadows forming dark lines going from upper left to lower right. They are formed by our mental connection; they do not really exist. The three sets of shadows do not even touch each other.

    Implied arc

    In the lower part of this image you see an arc of yellow lights. They are really just discrete points. Since they are closely spaced and in a regular pattern, we see a complete arc. And it continues despite the dropout on the far side.

    Implied region

    The area inside the magenta line is seen as a distinct region of the image. Inside the line is one area, outside is another separate one. It’s not really true, but that is the way we see it.

    Application

    The marvelous human brain is unsatisfied with incomplete forms. We “fill in the blanks” unconsciously. And it is even rewarding. You feel more satisfied by solving a puzzle, by completing an image from clues. A few points is seen as a line, some repeated shapes is a region, things in proximity seem to go together. It is amazing. When an artist works with his viewer to make a game it can be fun for both.

    So how about the image at the top of this topic? A few arcs? A couple of rectangular blobs? Or is it a spotlighted figure? Or a spider?

  • How Much Processing?

    How Much Processing?

    I guess this implies several possible questions. How much is too much? How much am I allowed to do? Should a final image look as “close” to the original photography as possible? This has been a dilemma for me until recently. I’ve come to the position that any amount of processing is OK, as long as I like the result.

    My history

    I started out my creative journey with the mindset of an engineer. Photographs should be an exacting match to the scene. This led to an emphasis on technical skills, warmly liked by engineers, emphasizing precision. Creativity was finding the right scene, not something that might be developed in later processing. In fairness. these were the days before Photoshop.

    Later on, I became heavily involved in my local camera club. Our club was great – better than any I encountered in the surrounding communities. But still. there is a collective think that tends to permeate these. One of the mantras in our organization was “no hand of man” in landscape shots. I was generally OK with this, but I thought sometimes that some shots could actually be improved by relaxing that constraint. But I played along.

    It came to a head for me at one contest where I got rebellious and submitted a photo that had a bit of a Photoshop twist in the clouds. I had Photoshop by them and was getting frustrated that “Photoshopped” images were generally disapproved in our contests. After winning the blue ribbon I let them know how it was created. There was a lot of discussion, ranging from it should be disqualified to what’s wrong with that? I kept my blue ribbon, but that was about the end of my involvement in camera club. I needed to stretch, not be constrained.

    I bring these up to let you know that I came from a background of avoiding heavy post processing. It has taken me a long time to give myself permission to get creative or even liberal in post.

    Reality

    I never had a darkroom, so I never internalized how much manipulation took place there. As I learned about it, one of my reactions was “they’ve been cheating all this time”.

    My investigation of darkroom capabilities brought me to finally understand Ansel Adam’s famous quote that “The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.” I began to see that famous photographers had always felt free to bend and modify their images in post production. Some of Ansel Adam’s assistants say it usually takes many hours to print one of his images. This is because he requires such extensive work in spotting, bleaching, burning, dodging, etc.

    One of the most extreme examples is his famous image “Moonrise Over Hernandez”. He had to capture it very quickly and the negative is flat, low contrast. It require a lot of work to print to his expectations. Ansel removes clouds and greatly changes the tonality and contrast of the print. So the takeaway is that the print is an interpretation of the negative. Anything is fair. I have come to believe that if Ansel had Photoshop he would do much more than he did.

    A new understanding

    So in my own journey, I have come to a place where I do not feel so constrained by the original image. An image is raw material. What is important to me is what I can visualize it becoming. As I become more skilled at tone correcting and color enhancement, my vision is being extended. If I don’t like that building or person in it, take them out or move them. If the sky is weak, replace it. Maybe this isn’t a great image on its own and it needs to be composited with one or more other fragments to create something new.

    I finally discovered – or allowed myself to accept – that this is art, not reality. The reality of the scene need not be a hinderance to what I might envision making of it. What becomes even more important is my vision as an artist and my skill in working with the image. An image is not just what it is, it should be what I want it to be.

    The image at the head of this post is an example. It is made up of 2 images and the final result does not look like either of the originals.

    Never believe a photograph. It is not truth. It is always subjective, if not outright modified.

    Let me know what you think, and check out my online gallery for more examples.

  • Image Library vs Creativity

    Image Library vs Creativity

    I recently wrote 2 articles that seem, on the surface, to be contradictory. In When The Flash Goes Off I discussed the cognitive theory that we recognize images we like based on a library stored in our mind. In It’s Complicated I argued that there is a creative side of our mind that discovers and creates new things. Which is right? I believe both are. It is recognition from the image library and creativity, not either or.

    I believe that when I am searching for images, the mental library is being scanned all the time. This is a fairly conscious activity. I have asked my mind to let me know when there is something there that I probably want to be aware of. This is the active hunting phase.

    Here is an example from a recent shoot. I was near Leadville Colorado. One of my favorite areas in the world. Cruising around the old mining area I came on this scene below. I love old mining cabins, beaver ponds, ice, mountain views, and historic areas. So those are all filed in my image library. This hit on all of these. It was immediately obvious that I would have to stop and work on this scene. No chance of going past it. My head was exploding.

    Colorado Mining Cabin, Late fall

    Vs. Painting

    By the way, why does this hunting work much better for photography than for painting? Because a painting is constructed from nothing. The canvas starts blank. The artist must decisively choose and place every element wanted. The camera, instead, constantly receives massive amounts of information. Every place the camera is pointed and every time the shutter clicks, there is a complete, fully formed image. The photographic artist’s job is to sift, reduce, minimize, compose, organize this embarrassment of riches to select what would be a worthwhile image from all this. A completely different mindset from painting. And this is why the mental image library works to locate promising scenes.

    Where is creativity?

    Contrast the mountain cabin above to the image at the top of this post. This was taken on Loveland Pass in late fall in the early evening after sunset (burrr – very cold). This image was preconceived before I got to the location. The reason I was at Loveland Pass was specifically to look for this. I challenged myself to explore the concept of “dark” and this was one variation that formed in my mind. I had never taken an image quite like this before. This one, as a matter of fact, is a composite of several time exposures.

    I hope this is perceived as a valid and fresh take on the concept of “dark”. I hate the phrase “out of the box” and seldom apply it to myself. Maybe because I fought long and hard to never let myself be confined to a box. Too many people toss it off casually. The trouble is, it’s easy to say it, but doing it takes a lot of discipline.

    So this was not a result of my mental library. It was a new creative event. I consciously pre-visualized the image rather than recognizing it as I passed by. Actually, it was too dark to have recognized much of anything.

    So where did it come from? In this case, I posed a project for myself and that got the other side of my subconscious mind working on solutions. This is one source of creativity. Other creativity drivers are looking for connections, asking “what if”, and seeing examples of other work. The subject of creativity is too big for here. It needs other posts.

    Complementary

    Mental image library or “out of the box” creativity? Yes, both.

    These are not in opposition. Rather they are just 2 different aspects of our marvelous minds at work. They are complementary. Together they are 2 of many tools we have that allow us to see and create great images.