Findingviews
Picture sales and an open notebook of thoughts from Orginal Robart
The Evolution of Findingviews:
The 2nd in a series of articles talking about the evolution and redevelopment of the Findingviews digital arts website.
I teach beginners digital photography and had a recent discussion with a student who has done extremely well and is now central to a new camera club being set up. He was finding that the role of club leader was reducing his shooting time and whilst rewarding it was not actually taking pictures.
This is a common problem.
If you have a creative drive and creative urges are high then you will naturally want to push yourself forward as hard as possible. When you find yourself drawn in a direction that reduces your creative time, or when life intervenes to reduce the time available for your art then frustration is natural. After all a great artist once said that the best way improve yourself is to do something everyday. Unfortunately for many people this is difficult and leads to frustration.
Frustration is counter productive and needs to be avoided. A frustrated artist may end up dwelling on the negative or the impossible. It may lead to a paralysis of action. Not a good thing.
I have this problem too. Some times the work I do leads me away from the creative and I find myself wondering about what to do next.
I have found one answer to the problem. It is to float in the wind. It is impossible to control everything that happens in life. What is in control however is your attitude and ability to take advantage of opportunity. So what you need to do is not worry when life stops you from doing what you want. Relax, deal with one problem at a time and get back out there taking pictures as soon as you can. However just because you cannot go our with your best camera that should not stop you. These days most of us carry cameras in our phones. Take a moment out to quickly take a picture of things that catch your eye. This quick snapping will help you keep your eye in on composition.
So don’t make a chore out of things, don’t get stressed, snap away and when you can go out and do great work.
That way you can go on for years, ever improving your craft.
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I’ve recently produced an abstract pattern and thought it might be interesting to run through the flow of events and processes that led to this particular piece being created.
It all started in on a Sunday afternoon on the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal when I spotted some catkins above my head. The weather was beautiful that day – with a clear blue sky, I took a
photograph using my mobile phone – sadly I didn’t have a good camera available (the battery was in need of a charge). However the final picture I felt was full of potential. So I took a little time to study it. That photograph is on the right. A favourite theme of mine is how the outstretched branches of trees can really look like the system blood vessels and veins in an animal.
Those thoughts got me thinking in sort of laterally fractally kind of way.
If trees can be like veins, and veins when abstracted can look like neurons and these patterns can sort of look like a map.
So plants can be like animals, can be like vascular systems can be like guides to the things we make.
How to show that in an image?
The Connects Pattern
My first step was to put the focus on the shape. That meant getting rid of the sky and simplifyingthings, taking everything right down to its minimum in Photoshop. That looked interesting but wasn’t enough of an image to capture the feeling I wanted. It was a start. I look the pattern I’d created and took a section from it and twisted its orientation onto a new layer in Photoshop. That looked better but was not complete. It was time for a bit of experimentation. Now I was painting with the the shapes in the photograph and I felt an abstract pattern starting to come together. The next step was to take a look at the colours. Taking my map thoughts as an inspiration; I took memories of the colours in the London underground map and started to apply these to the pattern. Things were going the way that I wanted. It looked bit flat so I rendered in little bits of lighting on odd parts of the picture.
The final result looked like a map that was bit off its head, a bit like prints of branches, a bit like paint splatter and a bit like something organic and living with odd bits of colour and detail that sort of stand out and make you raise an eyebrow. To me that says complex pattern and I think on reflection I’ve achieved that as I keep finding new shapes hiding in it.
Reasons Not To Steal Software
I was recently talking to someone who has to constantly reinstall Windows on his PC. After a bit of chatting it emerged that the root cause of his problems was the downloading of pirated copies of state of the art music production software. Something he wanted to learn but could not afford. The pirates had done the pirate thing and used the software installs to place their own nasties on his PC. The result was a system so unstable he wasn’t really getting any where with it.
I’m not going to talk about the fact that software piracy is wrong (it blatantly is) – but rather on the problem that comes with the perceived need that only the biggest and best software is worth having. That if you are going to be digitally creative you have to have to top of line software in order to succeed.
Here are the problems.
If you steal software you run the risk of your computer being attacked – stopping creativity.
If you go straight to the super pro software you run the risk of not learning the fundamentals and also – and this is the real kicker – you learn the risk of not learning how to creatively push software to get something really cool out of it. You see the power of top end software is not just the gee whiz features. It is the way in which you can combine functions to create something truly original. If you only use the features as are and do not learn how to push the software – what you create will be limited. Ultimately what you make will not be of the high standard needed to truly stand out.
So the message is – start by pushing consumer or open source software. Do great work, get it noticed and then upgrade and upgrade and upgrade. Each time you upgrade you do better work and you succeed.
So don’t pirate. Learn instead to be original.