Afleveringen
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The other day I was on the phone with my friend Neale James and we were talking about a recent episode of his podcast The Photowalk, on which he was talking to our mutual friend Sean Tucker about creativity. âI invite you,â Neale begins the episode, âto imagine a five-pointed star. Now on each point of the star, Iâd like you to think of a word thatâs important to you in terms of creativity or your creativity. Each is a kind of cornerstone of the why and even how you create as of today.â As an aside, if youâre not listening to Nealeâs show, you really should give it a try. Neale is a terrific host and his episodes are masterclasses in audio production and atmosphere. Anyway, as we were talking about his episode with Sean, he asked what the points on my creative star might be. On one hand, âwhy do you create?â is a deceptively simple question that many of us spend inordinate amounts of time wrestling with â at least I do. I think that Nealeâs clever addition âas of todayâ gives us a little wiggle room and leaves the possibility open that these five terms donât have to define our making for all eternity, but rather just for now. Itâs one of the reasons that I love this as an exercise. While the creative process itself is important, I think that checking in with ourselves around why we create is equally valuable â maybe even more so because it allows us to square what weâre making against why weâre making it.
QUESTIONS
What are some of the points on your creative star?
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
LINKS
My archive of paintings
Dorothy Simpson Krause
inkAID
Father Bill Moore
Shepard Fairey
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If youâve been subscribed for a while, you probably know Iâm a big Nine Inch Nails fan and have been since 1990 when I saw them open up for Peter Murphy. The other day, I was watching a terrific video with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross breaking down some of their most iconic tracks. One of the more fascinating aspects of the video was how much Trent talks about process and how important the âfeelâ of the music was and still is. âWhen we write music,â Trent says, âitâs coming from a place where its main intent is to have you feel a certain way. Itâs not coming from a love of melody and a joy of intricate chord progressions or technical wizardry.â
I love this because heâs not just chasing easy likes or trying to impress the audience. Instead heâs focusing on how the work serves the overall project and on the relationship between the work and the audience. Itâs not a âlook at meâ type of thing, like a gratuitous guitar solo or a vocalist who takes every opportunity to sing an unnecessary run. Thatâs not the point, which I think speaks to a level of creative maturity thatâs important to cultivate as any kind of artist.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Last week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures. If youâre a longtime listener, you may think youâve heard this before, and youâre right, you have. But this time itâs different. Iâll get to why in a minute, but first I need to back up.
In 2008, I was teaching Photoshop at Tri-Community Photo in Covina, California. One of the other instructors and I started doing photo walks with some of the students on the weekends. As they got more popular, we put up a simple web page called Faded & Blurred that had details about the upcoming walks. It pretty quickly evolved into a full-blown site, complete with a blog, spotlights on some of our favorite photographers, and a podcast called Q&A@F&B, which was a series of long-form conversations with photographers who were willing to sit down with me for an hour and talk about their work. In addition to getting to talk with photographers like John Keatley, David duChemin, and Ibarionex Perello, I also spoke with Bill Wadman for the first time. Bill and I hit it off straight away, and in 2012, when he was thinking about doing a weekly photography podcast, he started auditioning potential co-hosts. He reached out to me and asked if Iâd be interested. I said sure, and my audition ended up being the first episode of OTP. For the next 6 years and 325 episodes, my Tuesday mornings were spent recording the show, with me in Rancho Cucamonga, Californiaâat least to startâand Bill in Brooklyn, New York.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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The artist Richard Serra died recently, and I know heâs considered a big deal in the art world, but honestly Iâve never really gotten what all the hype is about. I suppose I can appreciate the scale and the forms of some of the work in the same way that I can appreciate the architecture of Frank Gehry, but overall, it just never really grabbed me. Anyway, one of the posts that came up in my feed contained a quote by him that goes:
âArt for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.â
LINKS
Conversation with an Artist: Richard Serra
Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)
Richard Serra on his Drawing (2011)If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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After recording last weekâs episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video thatâs both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called âAI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.â The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work. The dataset was initially intended for research but has since been made available commercially and has been used to train AI models, including MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. While it does contain images from the public domain, it also contains millions of copyrighted images, as well as explicit content. As they say in the video, no consent was obtained, nor were artists given the opportunity to opt in or opt outâand this is really at the core of why so many artists whose work has been stolen are so upset.
LINKS
Juxtapoz article
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz
AI algorithms
Discussion on Threads
Gagosian
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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About a week ago, I jumped back into using Photoshop for the first time since 2018 and Iâve got to tell you, it was kind of like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Yes, the interface has changed a little and a bunch of terrific new tools have been addedâespecially Object Select, which Iâll come back to in a minute. But even after such a long hiatus, it was still so familiar that straight away it got me thinking about why I stopped using it, and in a broader sense, about some of the decisions we make around the tools we use.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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I started this Iteration on February 29thâLeap Dayâand for me it was a good day, which, frankly, I really needed. In the last Iteration, I talked about how difficult 2023 was for me and in the week or so since I shared it a lot has happened. Probably the biggest thing is that Iâve started going to therapy. Iâve danced around it for a long time and I think it just got to a point where I could no longer keep pretending that everything was okayâthat I was okayâ and that whatever was âwrongâ with me, I could either fix it or just keep pushing it down. Neither of which is true, of course.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Iâm not going to bury the ledeâ2023 was not a great year for me, especially financially. In fact, I think it was one of the worst years Iâve had since I became a solo creative, and for the most part, it was nobodyâs fault but mine. One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity (get the book here) and in it, thereâs a scene where Rob (played by John Cusack) is going through a particularly frustrating time and says, âIâm sick of the sight of this place. Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country A through K" rack out on the street and go work at a Virgin Megastore and never come back.â I can definitely relate to that and itâs kind of where I was at the end of 2022. But I thought I would give it one more year to see whether I could come up with some new ideas and new work and maybe figure out a way to navigate the changing landscape of trying to eke out at least a partial living by being creative. And I know that phrase âbeing creativeâ is pretty loaded and it means different things to different people. For me, by and large it means painting, writing, and podcasting, or some combination of the three. Photography is in there somewhere too, but Iâm still not really sure where.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iâd love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Today is February 5th and it would have been my dadâs 83rd birthday. I normally mark the day by posting a simple message like âI miss you, Dadâ on Instagram or Twitter, when Twitter was still a thing and I was still on it. Today, I want to do something a little different and tell you a story. My dad could be tough and for a big part of my adolescent life, we butted heads. A lot. At one point, it got pretty bad and we actually didnât talk for a while. It seemed like we were often at odds with one another about something, but maybe thatâs just how I need to remember it. When he got sick, we got another chance to get good and let all of the things that once seemed so important just melt away. As heartbreaking as it was to see him deteriorate like he did, I really am grateful for the time that it allowed us to spend together. We managed to get to a place where we respected each other, not just as men, but as father and son. We spent a lot of time on the front porchâoften in silence. We watched a lot of westerns and we talked about some of the things that went unspoken for decades. It wasnât perfect, but it was good. I was holding his hand when he died in 2013 and while I was extraordinarily sad, when he took his last breath I was also grateful. He had fought as hard as he could for as long as he could, but now his pain was over and he could finally rest.
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A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a set of wireless mics. I had been wanting and maybe even needing a set for a long time as a way to record the random conversations I seem to have with people out in the world on any given day. Iâd been looking at them for a while, but I saw a review that Curtis Judd didâwho was one of my favorite audio YouTubersâand I thought, âI'm just gonna get these. They'll be fine.â I had been going back-and-forth between the RĂžde Wireless Go IIs and the DJI Mics and then saw these Hollylands and thought, âYou know what? I'm just gonna get them. The reviews are great (but specifically because I trusted Curtis).â So I bought them and they were just packaged so well and the design of the packaging was so well thought outâand borderline meticulousâthat I decided I needed to do a video about it and talk about why those kinds of details are importantâat least important to me.
LINKS
My video âunboxingâ of the Hollyland Lark Max mics
Hollyland Lark Max - 2-Person Wireless Microphone
Curtis Judd - Hollyland Lark Max Review
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If youâve spent any time around me at all, you know that I have opinionsâlots of themâand I have since I was a kid. Sometimes when I would offer my unsolicited thoughts on various things, my mom would respond with âOh, there he isâŠmy little critic.â The thing is itâs not just criticism. Not always, anyway. More often than I generally care to admit, I find myself feeling personally offended, either by the design or functionality of a product or service or by someoneâwhether I know them or notâwho simply doesnât do something the way I think that it should be done. And to be clear, itâs not that I think that Iâm better as much as I think that the way I do certain things is. Iâm not right all the time and I have no problem admitting that. But when I am and I think that youâre not, Iâll happily tell you. I think itâs something I inherited from my dadâor maybe itâs a trait of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Either way, while I think Iâve gotten better about not being so critical (at least publicly), letting go of the behavior can be a mixed bag.
LINKS
Sean Tucker
The Meaning in the Making
The Man in the Arena
Simon Sinek
Start with Why
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Well here we are again, nearing the end of one more trip around the sun and I for one cannot wait for it to be over. Christmas used to be my favorite time of year, but that was really because of my mom. She would start decorating the house around Thanksgiving, and when I say decorating, I donât just mean putting up lightsâour house looked and smelled like a Hallmark store. Yes, there were lights, but she also had all sorts of ornaments, figurines, and little holiday town squares and villages. She wrapped or swagged garland everywhere she could, displayed her favorite Christmas cards from years past, and sometimes you could barely see the actual Christmas tree because it was absolutely covered with lights, decorations, and tinsel. Lots of tinsel.
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Back in the late 70s, there was a terrific documentary on the BBC called Connections. It was hosted by historian and author James Burke and now that I think about it, I donât remember whether I watched it on PBS or I borrowed VHS copies of it from my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Copeland who also loaned out copies of Cosmos. And to be clear, Iâm talking about the Carl Sagan version, not the Neil Degrasse Tyson version. Regardless, the show was all about tracing the connections between things that on the surface share nothing in common. I found it fascinating and I think it inspired me to start looking deeper at the world around me to try to see how things might be related.
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As we get into this Iteration, Iâd like to take a minute to let you know about some changes that Iâm working on that will be rolling out in the coming weeks and months. Iterations will still be weekly (mostly), but Iâm going to mix up the types of posts Iâll be including and treat it more like an old-school blog. For example, you may have noticed that the Blips have been getting more substantial in terms of the research I do and the number of links I include. They started out as a just few links to things that I saw or found interesting during the previous week and have been evolving into something more comprehensive and hopefully more interesting and inspiring for you. Moving forward, theyâll still be part of their own section on Substack, but Iâm going to lose the word âBlipâ and the number in the naming convention of the titles to alleviate any potential confusion that comes with having Blip number 47 alongside Iteration number 124. Iâm also going to be adding reviews into the mixâand that could mean books, movies, music, or the tools I use (like cameras or my favorite pencils)âso file numbering will be even more unnecessary. As you might expect, theyâll also typically include some sort of backstory and lots of links for you to explore. The more âexistentialâ essays (like last weekâs Learn to Love the Process) will continue, but wonât be quite as frequent.
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Over the past few days, the photography world has been buzzing about the âglobal shutterâ on Sonyâs new flagship A9 III. Iâve listened to various YouTubers andinfluencers talk about it as if itâs the second coming. Theyâre saying âitâs the most remarkable camera Iâve ever usedâ and calling it a âa game changer,â insisting that âit will change photography forever.â But hereâs the thing: for 99% of photographers, it wonât change anything. If this is all Greek to you, let me back up a minute and briefly explain what a global shutter isâand I promise that this Iteration is not just about photography.
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They say that one of the best ways to solve a problemâat least a creative oneâis actually not to think abut it. After all, how many times have you been doing something like taking a shower or going for a long walk and you find yourself having one of those eureka moments where suddenly the solution to a problem youâve been wrestling with forever seems so clear? It happens to me a lot and itâs one of the reasons that taking walks in the forest behind our house has become a daily ritual. Trying to be present in something other than active problem solving allows our brains to continue working in the background without us trying to consciously force a solution. The act of stepping away from a problem is called the âincubation periodâ and itâs been studied for decades. In his book The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas proposed that the creative process is made up of four stages: Preparation (the acquisition of knowledge to some task), Incubation (the background process that occurs when conscious attention is diverted away from the task), Illumination (the moment the creative idea flashes into sight or being), and Verification (when the creative idea is subjected to evaluation)." While there have been dozens of studies documenting and validating the importance and effectiveness of the incubation period, last week I experienced another example of it firsthand.
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As I was working through the recent redesign of my websiteâwhich you can read about or listen to in the last IterationâI started to look at some of the other software I was using to see whether what I was using still made sense for the projects Iâll be doing in the coming year. I think itâs sometimes easy to get into a routine of using tools that are âgood enoughâ that we just donât look for potentially better options. I know thatâs been true for me.
About eight years ago, I ditched Photoshop completely and started using the Affinity suite of Photo, Designer, and Publisher, which by and large have been great. There are a few features I miss, but nothing thatâs really kept me from doing the work that I needed to do.
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Last week I did a soft-launch of my newly redesigned website, which in an of itself isnât all that unique since Iâve resigned my website dozens of times over the years. What is uniqueâor at least differentâis the overall focus of the site and the process I went through putting it together this time around. I started by asking myself a relatively simple question: do I even need a website? The most common answer is âYes, of course,â which is often followed by âespecially because youâre an artist.â But I actually know quite a few âcreativesâ who donât have their own websites. Some rely on a strong social media presence, some have gallery representation that drives sales of originals or prints, and others just have a storefront, so that a dedicated personal site isnât really necessary.
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Next month is the tenth anniversary of my dadâs death, so naturally Iâve been thinking about him a lot. Last year, I completely forgot about it, which I tried to tell myself was actually healthy, but I just ended up feeling guilty about forgetting. If youâve been following me for a while, or youâre an OTP listener, you know that my relationship with my dad was often difficult, to say the least. But as Iâve been thinking about him lately and how Iâve talked about our relationship in the past, I feel like maybe Iâve been a little incomplete in how Iâve portrayed him. I loved my dad, no matter how close or how far we were in the moment, and the truth is that heâs just as responsible for my creativity and to an extent my curiosity as my mom and my stepmother were.
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Lately, Iâve been thinking a lot about inertia and motion and how it applies to my creative practice. We know that Newtonâs First Law of Motion says that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless some sort of external force acts against it. Conversely, an object at rest will tend to stay at rest. But I would argue that the Fist Law also applies to intangibles like thoughts and ideas. For example, this week has flown by. Actually, the past couple of weeks have and I think itâs because Iâve been working through so many ideas and potential projectsâand Iâve been working on them differently than I have in the past, which I think is whatâs making all the difference. And to be clear, when I say âworking,â sometimes that means just letting an idea go until it needs to be addressed. For some things that means now, but for others, that may mean next year.
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