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:
Suppose somebody wants to make a movie about you. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Except what happens when you realize your life’s so boring it makes for a pretty bad movie? A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life is the true story of how that happens to best-selling author Donald Miller, and what he does to re-write his life into a better story.
Miller is a beautiful writer. The first few chapters had me thinking he was a little whimsical, but his poetry builds into a tour de force deeper into the book. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years is a story about stories; what stories are, how they affect us, how we all live stories, how to live a better story, and how better life stories make for better characters. With raw honesty and wit, he tells us the story of his own journey to create a story-worthy life, using the principles of good story-telling to guide him.
Story-telling is real, it’s not a new 7-step product cooked up to making someone rich. The story of story is as old as mankind. We all tell stories. We make sense of our world through story. I’m a writer. I’ve read the classics on story-writing, plot-building and act structure. I never expected someone to weave the elements of story-writing into a book that teaches them to you, while showing you how the author used them to live a better life at the same time, and have it be beautifully written.
My favorite blogs of 2009; the signals amongst the noise that taught me new things, made me think different, and made me want to write better.
To me, Merlin Mann is the sanest voice in all of productivity blogging (well, most times). He pointed out that if you’re spending a lot of time reading productivity blogs about how to be more productive, you really just need to get your ass back to work. Amen. I love this man’s honesty and the way he writes; funny, conversational and chocked full of thought.
Try Real Advice Hurts, The Problem with “Feeling Creative”, and NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning. If you have 37 minutes and 22 seconds, watch Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now). Long, but awesome.
Rory Miller wrote the excellent Meditations on Violence: A Comparison of Martial Arts Training & Real World Violence and Chiron is his personal blog. It’s not always an easy read, he writes about aspects of violence and psychology that I think most of us living in cosy, peaceful lives don’t want to know about. But it’s real, and it opens my eyes. He recently wrote that “Chiron isn’t about growing readership and I’m not writing for you. We all know that.” I love that. Ironically, I think that commitment to honesty on his part is what drives people to read his blog anyway.
It isn’t easy making facts and statistics interesting. Lots of things fail at it: textbooks, movies, teachers. But Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals makes a smashing job of it.
There are 2 reasons why I love this book: one, it’s made me smarter. It’s taught me more about my food and it’s made me think more about my food. Two, it’s damn good reading. I’ve added Pollan to the list of writers I want to be when I grow up.
Michael Pollan is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine and Knight Professor of Journalism at Berkeley, he wrote both The Omnivore’s Dilemma and its sequel, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. I read them out of order (sequel first), but discovered it doesn’t matter.
In Defense of Food was written as an answer to The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it was written as a practical guide for the person who wants to eat consciously, whereas The Omnivore’s Dilemma centers around Pollan’s quest story to understand food. It tells a story about walking in the cornfields, being knee-deep in cow manure, working as a farm-hand, and hunting for dinner. It’s what makes this book so much fun. And personal. Pollan isn’t a distant observer, he reacts and responds to what he sees and how it changes his perspective on food, and I couldn’t help but do the same as I read along.
See those cartoons to the right of this column (if you’re reading via an RSS reader, click to go to 21 Dragons)? They’re all drawn by Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes wise, Hugh’s work is always original. And if you haven’t already guessed, I’m a fan.
So I was really excited when Hugh announced that the most popular series on his blog, Ignore Everybody – on how to be creative – was going to be published as a book. So excited that I pre-ordered two copies, one for me, and the other as a birthday gift for a friend who works in the creative industry.
Having read my copy of Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity twice over already, I love the book. (My aforementioned friend who works in the creative industry as a 3D artist called me to tell me how he loves the book, and called it ‘life-changing’. Real story.) Here’s why.
5 Reasons Why I Love Ignore Everybody
1. Ignore Everybody is Real
Ignore Everybody isn’t full of politically correct quotes. In fact, some of the cartoons are down-right cynical. But they’re honest. And honesty connects.
You’ll never see a cartoon like the one below in any motivational book. But it is oh so true. Hugh isn’t a motivational speaker, he’s an artist. There is a difference.
