Playing Around or Sharpening the Saw?

As an artist and photographer I use various sources to inspire my growth and learning. One of them is to read and study books written by photographers.

I’m in the middle of reading Zen Camera: Creative Awakening With A Daily Practice in Photography by David Ulrich.

It’s a beautiful hardcover book with gorgeous photographs. I love its Zen approach to creating and the exercises at the end of each chapter. Reading the exercises isn’t enough. You have to commit to doing them.

I’ve had, “Do 1 activity from Zen Camera on my weekly To-do list for 2 weeks.

Today I committed to actually doing the exercise. I picked on the activity called “Staying with it.” The first part of the exercise is to make multiple exposures of the same thing.

Take 50 to 100 photographs of a single subject. Explore it thoroughly… — David Ulrich, Zen Camera

The second part of the exercise is “…learning to stay with something—a session with the subject, digital editing, or any kind of creative work—beyond the point of resistance when you would normally disengage and move on.”

Because time was short this afternoon I decided to wait until another day to work on part 2 when I have a larger block of time.

I often approach exercises like this with a sense of play, focusing on the process more than on what I eventually create. But even though sessions like this are playful and joyful for me, I work hard at them and believe that I am “sharpening my saw” as an artist.

Today, I used an orchid plant that was in bloom as my subject. As I often do when I work in my dining room studio, I set up the camera on a tripod, and played around with depth of field, studying how I felt about the images when they were mostly in focus, or mostly not in focus, and how different it felt when it was the center of the flower in focus versus the edges of the petals.

I used 2 different lenses and extension tubes so that I could get closer to the flowers. Today I found that the none of the images made with wide open apertures (from F/1.8 to F/5.6) pleased me. I definitely preferred when more of the flower was in focus. This surprised me because I admire dreamy soft flower images. Realizing this, I will pay attention to images which have more blur by other artists to see how they’re different from the ones I made today.

Often I discover that playing around sparks new ideas or approaches to my work. Though it feels like play it’s more than that. It’s learning as children do, through play.

Recently I was working on an image of a blooming tree against the sky that I felt looked like Japanese art when I first saw it. After downloading the image to Lightroom and working on it in Photoshop, I wasn’t feeling the Japanese art look that I felt when I took the photo.

I began exploring a new application that had a lot of different photo effect plugins. In the process I found one that gave me something of what I was looking for but looked are too contrived for my taste. Exploring and playing around gave me an idea that led me to creating the image I closer to the one I envisioned in my mind’s eye.

When was the last time you introducing a little bit of play into your creative life? How do you sharpen your saw?

May you walk in beauty.

Here are some more of my part 1 photos of a single subject: