by Raghu

Sketch Away

Back in the days of film you could burn through whole rolls and not get a single photo worth keeping. Although it felt like it, it was not entirely wasted effort. Images from those rolls yielded clues to the best angle, position, framing, and so on, for the perfect image. In fact, at the National Geographic, professional photographers were known to burn through several rolls of film just to get the one or two images that made it into print.

Sketching, as this process of arriving at the best image is sometimes referred to, is a well-recommended practice because it informs and teaches, but also the practice runs help the photographer familiarize and connect with the subject.

Today, digital technology makes sketching accessible to all because, courtesy the delete button, any ‘burned’ digital film is easily recovered with nary a hit to the wallet.

Sketching is particularly useful in dynamic situations, such as in a scene with multiple elements, with many of them in motion. For instance, a street scene with a colorful vendor stall as the subject might include many moving elements such as hawkers, customers, pets, kids, etc. The photographer begins sketching the scene by making images at various positions around the vendor stall. After determining from the sketch images the best location to shoot from, he stations himself at that location and simply waits in anticipation. When the best moment of human interaction plays out, he clicks, a la Henri Cartier-Bresson, at the decisive moment.

Although useful, a few notes of caution are in order. Sketching is not needed in all or even in most situations, and in the worst case, where spontaneity is key, great opportunities to capture beauty and light may be missed. And so, it is for the photographer to assess the situation and make a determination if sketching is called for. As simple as the process is, sketching should not be mistaken to mean taking photographs without thinking. A bit of planning the sketch shots can save time down the road while making the final images.

Add sketching to your repertoire of tricks and you will be glad for what it does to your photography. Make sure, of course, you present only the best images for the world to admire! Stay calm and sketch away!

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 by Raghu

Permission To Create Junk

I read in an article on Unlocking your creative genius, no less, that “you must give yourself permission to create junk”. Eeeks! Create junk? Why would anyone want to do that? Isn’t the purpose of art to please? Coming from an author I admire, the suggestion struck me as counterintuitive. Creative and junk don’t mix! Or so I thought. But reading further, it all started to make sense. The author was suggesting that when you allow yourself to create more stuff — whatever you love to create, be they paintings, short stories, poems, whatever — without getting too hung up on quality, you will discover in your stuff nuggets of beauty and brilliance. That five-page essay you penned? It might be boring but you will find in it two or three beautifully crafted sentences, pure music to the ears. That is the nature of the creative process. You sift through lots of sand and silt to find nuggets of gold.

 

… when you allow yourself to create more stuff — whatever you love to create – more paintings, more writings, more poems  — without getting too hung up on quality, you will discover in your stuff nuggets of beauty and brilliance.

That analogy mirrors my own experience pursuing photography. Early in my journey, I would expect all of my images to be breathtaking — well, they certainly looked great in the viewfinder — but they would all turn out flat and uninspiring. Frustrated and discouraged, I almost gave up photography; only my love of the craft prevented me from calling it quits. I resolved to practice and study and learn. And that meant taking lots of pictures and learning from mistakes. Soon, I discovered that among the dozens of images from a photo session — my pile of junk — there were one or two really good images, stunning even. In creating the junk, I was learning about light, about composition, about perspective, and so on, and, on occasion, somewhere in the recesses of my brain, those learnings combined in creative ways to deliver a stunner or two. But the junk had to be created first!

The easy bit is creating junk, the hard bit is making the judgments. Which images to keep? How to judge your own babies?! Do you keep that sunrise image, nearly perfect, except, in the top right corner, high tension wires interrupt the golden yellow sky? What about the image of the young girl with a perfect smile, except, a stray arm intrudes the frame? Keep it? Decisions, decisions. In the beginning, when perfect images are few and far between, throwing out the near-perfect images feels like torture. But as you keep at it, as you keep shooting and learning and playing, the images get better and better, and weeding out the near-perfect ones becomes much easier.

Looking back, the early frustrations appear to have pushed me, unconsciously, to create junk, and the end runs there have been that my images are better now than they have ever been. The hard truth, though, is that the ratio of junk to gems is still much too high, higher than I would like to admit. Paradoxically, that is good news — it keeps me excited to learn and explore, to create more junk, albeit with intentionality, with hope, that some day I may unlock any creative genius within!

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 by Raghu

Too Little Art

I know I am wading into murky waters with this one, and while I may not be alone in thinking it, I suspect I am in the minority when I say this: we teach our kids too little art.

I am no expert on matters of education, but seeing what my kids learn at school, it seems to me that, art is almost an afterthought. Art — I am using the word broadly to include music, sculpting, dance, drama, and so on — is relegated to the bottom of the list, below math and science. Parents too — with the best intentions, of course — encourage their children to prioritize math and science. “Study for tomorrow’s science quiz,” they say, “the art piece you are painting now can wait.” Admonitions like these, repeated over the years, condition the young minds to view the place of art in life as secondary to other pursuits. Which is unfortunate because art needs to be, at minimum, on par with those supposedly more important pursuits.

But, truly, art delights and enriches life. It is the antidote to the drudgery of daily living, and to the extent parents encourage their children to do art they also encourage them to be creative, to see the beauty around them.

 

In an increasingly virtual world, art is a bridge to the real world, art keeps us human.

Since no age is too early to teach art, may I suggest, dear parents, to teach your young ones to paint with light? Simply hand them your smartphone and let them loose. Let them take pictures around the house, at the park, in the backyard. Aside from giving your eyes a break from staring at your screens, watching your child dash around shooting pictures will, at least for a few moments, let you experience the real world. And as you bond with her, oohing and aahing over the pictures she took, you will be teaching her, in a subtle way, about beauty and art. If your kids are older, hand them your old camera, show them how to operate it, and tell them to build a portfolio of a subject they love. Hang their artwork on the walls of your living room, remind them to create more such pieces, more art.

Kids with a healthy appreciation for art tend to become well-rounded adults, better prepared for the harsher realities of the real world. They also tend to be better at math and science. The role parents play in encouraging that trait cannot be underestimated. By all means, let your kids know that math and science are important but do also encourage them to practice, every day, art.

In an increasingly virtual world, art is a bridge to the real world, art keeps us human. Our children need more art, not less.

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