As a photographer, it’s both inspiring and maddening to see a beautiful photograph and wonder just how the photographer did it. I mean, there are photographs that are really good, with excellent composition and beautiful light. And then there are photos that transcend the really good; you don’t just appreciate them with your eyes alone but respond to them with your heart. Those are the photographs I wanted to learn how to take.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single book that talked about that. There were a lot of books about composition, technique and gear – which were great, but nothing about how to distill moments of feeling into a single frame.
Until I found Within the Frame: The Journey of Photographic Vision by David duChemin. To be honest, I’ve wanted to write about this book for the longest time, but I kept putting it off because I have no idea how to summarize a book which I’ve learned so much from. In the end, I think the best way for me to put it is to put it bluntly; this book changed my game.
It helped me move up from taking photos like these of Japan in 2008:
To photos like these in 2009:
I read earlier this week that it’s harder to be kind than it is to be clever.
My girlfriend and I were cooking dinner for my parents over the weekend. It was supposed to be fun, we were trying out a couple of new recipes and I wanted to let my mom and dad take it easy as we prepared them a meal. But one of the switches on our stoves just wouldn’t turn.
I wanted to use another stove but my dad – ever the fixer-upper – wouldn’t let it go. He forced the switch and gas started hissing out. Then the switch stuck, and we couldn’t turn it back! Gas kept leaking into the kitchen as we scrambled to turn the switch back and cut the gas off, but no luck.
Amidst this rush, I snarled at my dad: “I told you to leave it alone already!”
I really regretted that.
We twisted the switch back with a wrench soon after, and on hindsight there really wasn’t any danger in our well-ventilated kitchen. But rather than having a good laugh of relief over a problem solved, I’d turned the situation into an even unhappier one, just because I had to insist on having been cleverer.
The truth is, I had been the dumbest one in that room.
I know how lucky I am to be paid to write. I know how lucky I am to live in a beautiful, peaceful, modern country. I know how lucky I am to enjoy the friends and family I do. I know it. And yet it’s one of those days when everything I want feels a million miles away.
What do you do when you don’t want to do the work you love anymore? When what you should be doing feels like what you shouldn’t be doing. When you look back at all you’ve done and ask “so what?” What now?
I wish I had an answer for you. All I know is that even this is part and parcel of living the creative life, that some days you will feel really bad about the work you do or don’t do, and there doesn’t seem any way forward except to get on the treadmill and trudge on, again and again, one weary step at a time.
Unless it’s horrible, I don’t sugar my coffee too much. Too sweet and it becomes sugar water. Too bitter and drinking becomes torturous. Just a little bitter, because it forces me to consider the drink each and every time I take a sip – instead of mindlessly consuming it, the coffee becomes meditation; asking me to focus and be aware of it as I’m drinking.
I hated the new U.S.S. Enterprise ever since I saw it in the Star Trek reboot. Its nacelles burgeoned, its lower hull jutted too much forward and tapered way too much back. Where the old Enterprise NCC-1701 was an elegant, white seagull, the new Enterprise was a fat, obnoxious pelican that looked like it couldn’t stand on two legs.
The original Enterprise, a beauty of design.
The new USS Enterprise.
And yet, something kept making me look, and look, and look at it again.
It was just bitter enough to force me to consider it every time I looked at it.
My brother bought me the new Enterprise toy for my birthday, not suspecting the geeky design angst I was having over the imaginary starship. At last, I thought, this incessant tug to look at the ugly pelican could be satisfied, as I placed the toy model on my work desk.
First, care. Care intensely. Care about doing a good job. Care about not doing a bad job. Care about going the extra mile. Care even when nobody else seems to care. Care even when nobody else will notice. Care even when you don’t feel like caring. Care because you want to. Care because you need to. Care because you can’t not care. Care about making a dent in the universe. Care about making something new and exciting. Care about making something fun. Care about making something that scares you. Care about saying something. Care about making a difference. Care about seeing something no one else can see unless you show them. Care about making someone else care.
How to make something you can be proud of? Just care.
If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that a movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.
But we spend years actually living those stories, and expect our lives to feel meaningful. The truth is, if what we choose to do with our lives won’t make a story meaningful, it won’t make a life meaningful either.
From A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life by Donald Miller. Re-reading it now and still loving it. My review here.
My girlfriend was looking for a new place to stay, but instead of having her rent a room, I convinced her to come stay with me (yeah I know, big life change right?). It meant I had to completely re-design my room, which was really set up for just one to stay and work, not two.
I had two main goals for the re-design, which informed everything:
1. It had to comfortably accommodate the living and working spaces for two.
2. It had to be as simple as possible, in form and function.
The Old Room
This is what my room looked like prior to the re-design.
The wardrobe and single bed were really set up for only one.
The main anchor of the room was this bookshelf which took up the most space and attention. Unfortunately, I realized from the beginning that it had to go, it was taking up way too much room and I couldn’t maneuver anything new around it.
I also realized that no matter how much I tried, the new room wasn’t going to fit everything I already had and still have space left for hers. That meant I had to go through a heavy, nuclear-level de-clutter.
De-cluttering my books took the longest time. I pared down my collection to the ones I absolutely wanted to keep, and these were transferred to a temporary shelf in the living room (it was interesting how few books were really essential and how obvious which ones they were).