I have a friend who asks at the end of a shoot, “Did you make art today?” “I think so” was my typical response because I’m never sure what I do with my camera will ever be considered art exactly.  Thinking back, it’s probably because I’ve assessed too many contact sheets and digital proofs filled with prosaic visual records.

Classically, visual attention can be registered in seconds when viewing photos. See it, scan details, like it (or not) – turn the page – on to the next. On the web we’ll hit the fwd button like a flip book. The occasional extraordinarily recorded event will slow this down. Let’s call that pace “significant attention”.

An extraordinary event brilliantly recorded will hold your attention for a minute or two. Art of the “fine” variety, however, must hold your significant attention everlastingly.

The last half of my photography life has been an obsession with reducing detail. Less is more but not always easy in commercial applications. If you’ve ever tried to get away with dead black shadows, blown highlights and partially obscured product you know from what I speak.

“Music is the space between the notes” – Claude Debussy

I thought of this quote before discovering someone much more intelligent said it first.  I was at a show listening to bluegrass virtuosos play so fast that it was hard to discern a space between notes.  It made me realize that there was only one interpretation possible.  There were no spaces for me to think or feel anything but the energy of their content.”  – From a post dated – Dec. 17, 2009.

The objective is to gain significant attention as long as possible ahead of an inevitable boredom strike. Offer enough detail to entice an empathic exchange; leave room for interpretation for with no space between the notes boredom strikes fast.

Instinctively, owners of the iPhone Apps Hipstamatic and Swanko Lab know this.  Instant analog art automatically obscures enough detail to give your most pedestrian recording significant attention. It’s what’s behind the craze; easy, fast, shareable, instant art – sometimes of the fine variety.

Both Apps are grab bags of washed out highlights, muted blotchy colors, unpredictable tonal shifts, lens flair, dark edges, dust spots, scratches and numerous “add in” color effects; like shuffling through an old shoebox of treasured snaps 20 years premature.

Samples from the Hipstamatic Flickr Display:

Jess Lee - InVisage CEO

I’m geeking out on this one. Since everyone is a photographer and nearly everything is a camera, it may do the imagination good to understand where technology is going.  I always figured it inevitable that lens resolution would be the limiting factor with respect to image quality.  In some aspects it’s already the case, but I’m talking about what happens when the only way to improve imaging is to improve lens resolution.

How long will it take for your phone camera to be as good as many Digital SLRs?  a) Ten years?  b) Five years?  c) Less than two years?  Not only is “c” the correct answer but we are returning to film; quantum film made by embedding quantum dots into an emulation that coats a plate.

As you’d expect, anything named “quantum” is very small.  Each dot can be tuned to the light spectrum with early production showing a 4X increase in efficiency with significant cost savings as well.  This would mean that your 3 megapixel iPhone camera would be increased to 12 mp.

Interprelated to your high end digital camera, you can anticipate 80 megapixel quantum film cameras with a native ISO of 800 and greater bit depth (told you I’d geek out) means we’d be creating nearly unimaginable photographic detail with a hand held camera in very low light.  The race for technical quality will essentially end.  I’m guessing each photographic file created will be in the neighborhood of 500 megabytes per image as a tiff.

What does this mean for a profession already reeling from 6 years of crazy change?  Hard to know but I don’t see this post becoming irrelevant any time soon.

A more detailed explanation can be found HERE at dpreview.com

For more information, watch this short video in which InVisage CEO Jess Lee explains his company’s breakthrough:

Stargate Studios in South Pasadena CA is one of the current day electronic scenic painting and model making studios [via Gizmoto.com]:

Michael doesn’t consider himself creative. This isn’t a strange thing to hear, it’s a native thought to at least half the population. Maybe there’s something to it. After all, the average problem solver will adhere to formula and process. Is adding a+b to get “d” all that creative when your given both “a” and “b”? Question and answer – call and response – is the comfort in most zones.  When clients come to us with a photo layout, when an illustrator receives a rough sketch, or when musicians are handed a string chart, parameters are tight enough to apply something that looks and sounds creative enough to pass. Vibrancy resides in the problem not the solution. Solutions are sold as commodities. As well, we can find solutions waiting for problems, but who finds the problems? The tough creative challenge is defining a problem – finding the insight – inspiring the pen. Fact is, the solution may actually be in the problem once the discipline is found to define it. This is what Michael Bierut speaks of when he claims not to be creative. “I feel like I’m a Doctor and I can’t just practice medicine on myself, so I need patients that are sick, the sicker the better in fact.” Treatment in itself can be creative, yet the real nuggets remain in diagnosis. Without defining the problem we are doubtlessly treating the wrong ailment.

According to his online website Design Observer, “Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. Prior to joining Pentagram in 1990 as a partner in the firm’s New York office, he worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, ultimately as vice president of graphic design.”

In this video from the idea centric website The 99%, Michael Bierut offers a peek at his design philosophy and examples of treated ailments. Regardless of the opening disclaimer about his creative nature, Bierut is a first-class problem finder.

I’ve seen time lapse before, who hasn’t?  Maybe it’s a shaky seedling sprouting from the ground or a street scene with jittery people.  Yet, there’s an emotion to Ben’s short films that I find unexpected.  Not only is the still frame that captures the motion well considered but the motion itself has a power beyond the usual “cool” of time compression.

The shapes and movement are the definition of organic power and fluidity.  The movement of nature contrasted by the immovable man made objects and the planes landing at LAX like alien space craft as nature stays still.  The feelings from the hours fills a single frame.

“It’s a pretty organic process.  I don’t have any specific work flow or rules that I follow.  I shoot all my own footage, and I shoot *a lot*.

When I’m doing a shot, I’m out there standing in the cold, or the heat, or the fog and it kind of embeds a feeling of a place that
carries on with you on into editing.  I don’t go into a reel with a
plan – I’ll often try lots of different music and quick edits until I
find something that feels “right” and then roll with that feeling.

When I watch my earlier work, “Montipora” for example, I find that I get bored.  I felt that way when I was editing it too, but figured it was unique enough that it wouldn’t matter – however, in hindsight, I should have just gone with instincts.  Now, the moment I feel like something isn’t up to par, or boring, or doesn’t go well with the rest of the film – I just delete it and never think about it again.  More than half of the stuff I shoot ends up on the cutting room floor.

When I go out shooting, often I’ll have a vision for what I want to
capture, but I’m never afraid to ditch my vision for something
unexpected or beautiful.

For example, for the Golden Gate Bridge shot where you see the moonlight on the water (in “Another Cloud Reel”), my vision was to get a telephoto shot of the moon rising behind the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge towers (similar to the moon shot in Koyaanisqatsi).

You can’t get shots the Golden Gate Bridge from every angle without a helicopter, so I had to plan it out so I was there when the moon was in the right spot and mostly full, etc…  I lug all this stuff up there, take one look at the bridge and the moonlight on the water, and I immediately ditched the moon behind the towers idea for something incredibly more beautiful.

Nature is always doing incredibly beautiful things – a lot can be said about being in the right place at the right time and being flexible.”

- Ben Wiggins

Go here for more of Ben’s work: Delrious on Vimeo

By my corporate experience, managers are taught that high productivity is found somewhere near the center of a fear > comfort spectrum. The good stuff lives in the middle and employee commitment is more desirable than compliance. The problem is that our instruction to engage employees is faulty. A one size fits all corporate strategy places individualism on a shelf. It’s naturally risk averse. This will be no more evident in the next year than in marketing case studies – marketing ROI is back with a vengeance – but please excuse my digression.

A fear inducing motivation slaughter was no clearer to me than when we experienced a 20% agency layoff. As painful as it was for everyone, it’s probably most painful for productivity because it died a horrible death only to revive slowly – after much nurturing – a couple weeks later. It turns out that fear of being next to go stopped folks in their tracks. Not surprising.

Conversely, those nearly tenured by position where – beyond a doubt – the lowest performers on average. Furthermore, common sense says that to give those folks a raise in reward would offer higher comfort and still lower performance. Comfort sent a strong message that our default state – doing what we know and following it through to customary success – was not worth a moment’s deviation.

Our default is to be risk reluctant and to think things through to a logical end with no deviation from task. We narrow our purpose and use our craftiness to get to the finish line as fast and as free from criticism as possible – we go with what we know when under pressure. Perform with all eyes on you and you’ll do what it takes not to fail, together with relying on a tested formula for success.

Thus is the world of carrots and sticks. Carrots (comfort) and sticks (fear) produce low motivation.

In his TED video presentation, Dan Pink gives an outstanding presentation – argument if you will – for what science asserts truly motivates us. Dan explains that there is a mismatch between what science shows and what business does. Business wants innovation, yet motivates us to be formulaic with a narrow view of problem solving.

Dan shows us that reward in the free economy dulls creative thinking. The if/then rewards program performs well with narrowed focus problems, yet broad creative thinking suffers as a result of conventional rewards. When we use our mechanical skills, higher rewards yield better performance.  However, even rudimentary cognitive skills suffer with even moderate rewards. The highest rewarded group of cognitive thinkers do worst of all.

Then what is our native motivation you may ask? Dan concludes by presenting three areas of motivation:

Autonomy: The urge to direct our own life.

Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.

Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in service of something larger than ourselves.

In short:  “Do it because you like it”

Originate:

Remember to write down that dream in the middle of the night because you’ll forget it by morning.

Create:

Experience, Research, Think, Rest … Experience, Research, Think, Rest – Repeat as often as it takes.  More – Do it again.

Invent:

Hey – this is cool!  And I pulled this out of my butt.

Innovate:

Hey – this is cool and it’s going to be HUGE!

During my four long corporate years, the phrase, “perfection is the enemy of good” used to rub me the wrong way for no apparent reason.  I grasp the theory: Keep striving for perfect and you will never deliver good; you’ll be waiting in purgatory for perfect to materialize.  For me, this was never a very satisfying concept.  If you’re willing to settle for good you might as well give up now.

Today it hit me: Perfection is the enemy of beyond expectations.  Previsualize perfection and you’re closing yourself off to spontaneous brilliance, and brilliance is nothing if not spontaneous.

By far my best seems to just happen organically.  So strong is that feeling, that it’s easy to dismiss my involvement in the end result.  It’s as though I’ve practiced for decades to just let things happen at my will.

Ernie Schenck authored a good book about the creative struggle against limitations: The Houdini Solution.  It’s a strong concept to which I whole-heartedly endorse: The heights of your creative force can’t be fully realized until you get push back.  In other words, “Think Inside the Box”.

I wrote an essay “Limit Creativity, Get Innovation” back in ’06 about the same idea.  To quote myself:

“I recollect just enough from algebra 101 to make my neuro-memories retrieve the brain pain of too many variables – x ,y, a, b, c – give me an integer – please – I don’t know what Vanna White sees in those vowels.  The vagueness compelled me to walk clinging to the hallway walls attempting to reconcile formless reality as I struggled to see the patterns.  Orientation needs form and the walls offer structure; something to support yet overcome.”

Another way to think of it is to find a canvas.  Your creative assignment gets easier once defined.  For example, write something creative versus write about a thought you had yesterday, or go out and take pictures versus use this cheap disposable camera to find a great image within 50 feet of where you’re standing. Give your palette limits, then push back.