Currant Number Four

Nikon Coolpix 950 photo altered in Photoshop Elements

Today I’ve been thinking more about the topic of loss, and artistic perception in the context of having lost my Minolta A1 due to CCD failure recently. Having to resort to using my older Nikon 2 megapixel camera has changed the way I’ve approached photos. For one, I have far less control over the settings, (although with some tedious button pushing I can manually set focus,) and the results are often less satisfactory. But I also have found myself both looking at photos I normally wouldn’t have seen – like the two more recent abstract photos “Close Encounters” and “Partition”. I also feel like I have more liberty to manipulate images in Photoshop Elements. Perhaps my thought process is something like “Well the photo isn’t that great to start with, how much more could I mess it up?”

I believe the need to re-think my approach to creating photos for the blog has been a very creative exercise, and has helped me see more. My friend John once told me that Matisse only began to do his cutouts when he was too ill to stand at an easel. This is a good example of how loss of function may lead to great leaps of creativity. “Necessity is the mother of invention.”

It is interesting that when I think of evolution in this way I am biased to think of hardship, or more difficult conditions as being the primary driving selection criteria for species to evolve. But what about boons? Do changes we think about as “good” represent just as much of a force for evolutionary change?

A photographic example might be if Sony decided that because they couldn’t repair my Minolta A1 easily, they should send me a 10 megapixel Sony A100 digital SLR with a complete set of wide angle, telephoto, macro and normal prime lenses! (Ha, dream on!) Well as improbable as this scenario might be I think that it might help me change my perspective on photography as much as losing the Minolta in the first place and having to use an older camera (or having no camera at all.)

Well, the free digital SLR is not coming my way, but the useful lesson may be that I should try to regularly put my camera away, and just look and think about what kind of picture I might take if I had a camera in hand. I think that this exercise will help me see better and take more thoughtful pictures. It is free, and it may be more of a learning experience than actually taking a photograph!

For an interesting example of how adversity can influence creativity see the link to the right for takenbystorm.org