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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When the brain wires itself, the pathways that are most used become permanent and there’s a lesser chance the brain will employ different pathways.
The unknown allows us to find new ways of seeing the world, of feeling about things.
The more curious we are about ourselves and the world around us, the more problems we find to solve.
Taking what you’ve been given and working with it, moving with the energy rather than against it, is a vital part of creative improvisation.
Improvisation is our way of spontaneously reacting to what we’re handed by reality, even a carefully controlled reality,
Improvisation acknowledges that the only thing we really control is our craftsmanship, because the cards themselves are out of our control.
Agree
“Say yes,”
Accepting what’s there crucially contributes to our perception of a place, or of a person when we’re making a portrait.
Taking what you’ve been given and working with it, moving with the energy rather than against it, is a vital part of creative improvisation.
Contribute So...
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“Yes, and. . . .”
Photography is not objective. It has never been so, despite the best efforts of journalists and propagandists.
It’s not so much about what’s there as it’s about what I see and how I see it.
Make it yours.
Make every photograph you create a collaboration with what’s before you.
Try Something
“Make state...
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Take a risk and try something.
Listen to the questions, but don’t let them go without a response.
Improvisation isn’t about getting it right or being perfect. It’s about experimentation, and if it takes a few crappy moments or failed experiments to get to the gold, then it’s all worth it.
“There are no mistakes.”
Our sketch images provide similar clues.
There was a reason you pressed the shutter; what was it? The thing that pulled your eye, the way you felt about the scene—those things might be
Tell a Story
My photographs are all made first for me. But they are not made only for me.
keep the audience in mind.
Improv works best when it stays within certain constraints.
No one likes being excluded, and if the audience doesn’t have the clues to interpret what’s going on, they will be.
Give the viewers of your photograph what they need to understand the story or feel the emotion of the image.
Go with it. Own it. Take risks. Don’t expect perfection. Remember your audience.
Abandon Perfection
We seem to like the chase for perfection. I’m just not sure we’d know what to do if we caught it, or even that we’d be able to recognize it if we did.
practice is not the way we learn best, especially where creativity is concerned: play is.
This rejection of hyper-sharpness is why so many people are returning to film after 20 years of the growing digital revolution.
we’ve recently seen more and more pushback from all quarters about the use of Photoshop, particularly where issues of body image are concerned.
What we look for in our photographs is, of course, directly related to what we see.
The best and most honest work has always come hard.
It’s not because technical perfection is too good that I encourage you not to pursue it. It’s that it’s not good enough in the right ways. We can do better. We can go deeper.
“What’s it about?” is not the same as “What happened?”
What makes it difficult to tell a story within a single frame is the inability to form a classic narrative, but this doesn’t make storytelling impossible; it simply confines us to certain conventions that, when understood, allow us to tell or imply more powerful stories.
sense of story will make your images more engaging and compelling.
Five aspects of storytelling
Theme
A story succeeds on empathy and fails for lack of it. If you as a viewer don’t care, it’s not a relevant story.
movies are not about the plotline. The plotline tells the story, but the story is about something more.
The plot is merely the way we tell the story of the theme.
If photographs are to tell or imply a story, they must be about something.
Truth, justice, and love (or the lack of these things, or the search for them) are strong universal themes.
Loneliness, betrayal, our tendency to self-destruct, death...
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