Posts filed under 'Creativity'
I was taught an important lesson over ten years ago. While teaching in France, I gave English lessons to a Master Chef (whose humility did not permit him to speak of his hundreds of awards and distinctions) in return for getting cooking lessons. Aside from raking me over the coals many times for not having adequately memorised hundreds of herbs by smell and taste, or knowing exactly which of the hundred hanging pots would be most suitable for a certain sauce, he once became very upset with me when I suggested he give up his day job —which had nothing to do with cooking— and go to Paris to work full-time as a chef. I knew his job in the public service was mundane and quite boring, but I also knew he had received offers from some very high-class and trendy restaurants in the capital, so this didn’t seem like much of a stretch. Why was he upset? Partly because he didn’t want to sully his art, but mainly because —by turning a passion to commercial use— his love of cooking would become only a job. The flame that burned within him would be extinguished, and he could not live with himself.
I’ve always been the type to have a hundred hobbies. They’ve been ways of testing the waters of a new subject area, of dipping one toe into the stream and seeing how inviting it is. From there you can decide whether to jump in —wherein it becomes more than a hobby: it’s a career— or you can dangle the feet off the end of the pier, slosh around a little, have a stress-free day, and move on. My myriad hobbies have ranged from mineralogy to gourmet cooking, from medieval longbow archery to Victorian speculative technologies, from woodworking to herbalism. All of these things, I’ve simpled dabbled in, and attained the rank of advanced amateur, taking them no further, even though my interest in them bordered on the obsessive for periods of time. Somehow, there was always something even more exciting just around the corner, and the endless twists and turns of the journey kept me venturing forward, burning with the desire to try new things.
Not long after graduating university, the real world intervened. Having taught for a one-year contract in Newfoundland, I was a victim of a job market whose glut of teachers and dwindling student population had barred most young teachers without tenure or very specialised subjects (such as Special Education) from finding work. One of my chief hobbies during high school and university was programming and multimedia work, and this skill-set provided me the only opportunities I could find. Soon, I found plenty of work developing and managing kiosk, CD-ROM and website projects. The hobby had become a job, and the endless hours of keeping up with technology had drained any degree of enthusiasm I once had for it. The flame was extinguished.
But one of the other hobbies I had in high school was photography. It was a perfect amalgram of creativity and technical know-how. My piece-meal camera kit, along with my homegrown darkroom, allowed me endless hours of pleasure in taking and developing photographs. In university, my empty pockets meant giving up the somewhat-costly hobby, and it broke my heart. Eventually the camera broke, the darkroom was disassembled, and the world moved on.
Right now, I have almost no spare time, except for the 15 minutes or so in the morning while I eat breakfast and write in this blog. Not too long ago, my endless concentration on matters for my two jobs caused me to fear for my sanity… I was even unable to sleep, thinking unceasingly about my work and upcoming projects. I had no mental playground where I could tinker with non-work-related ideas, or subjects that I could read about to relax me before shuffling off to bed.
Then, by a fortuitous turn of events, I gained a new camera —a Canon Digital Rebel— which was by far the best camera I’ve ever owned, and a very capable manual one, at that. Suddenly, I have a hobby again, a mental break that allows me to focus on an activity that has absolutely nothing to do with my work.
I’ve finally rediscovered what my life was missing: the immersion of oneself into something non-imperative. No one will get upset with me if I take a lacklustre photograph. No one will hold each picture as a symbol of my livelihood. No one will pass me quotas, or force me to spend endless hours keeping up with all the latest advances. For once, I don’t even have to use a computer, if I don’t want to. The chains are slackened, the cage is opened.
What an amazing feeling, this newfound freedom….
November 17th, 2004
(Making the rounds via email. I have no idea about the original source….)
October 29th, 2004
A few months ago, just after our first-born had arrived, our old Kodak DC-280 was starting to falter and occasionally shutting off or losing power for no apparent reason. The Kodak –now literally held together with duct tape– had served us well, producing some 18,000 pictures over the 4+ years that we had had it, but now we needed something new, something reliable, to document our son’s childhood. I spent a few weeks sussing out the alternatives, and was thinking about getting an Olympus C-5xxx model, but I really wanted something I could upgrade with better lenses and standard photographic equipment. Alas, there was nothing around like that in my price range. At the last moment, however, I managed to swing an excellent deal on a Canon Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) thanks to a personal favour someone owed me. For less than the cost of the Olympus, I now had a great camera with full manual controls and the ability to use my EOS lenses, filters, and other gear. The 6.3 megapixel resolution was nothing to sneeze at, either. But recently, we’ve been running into some frustrating problems. And they all have to do with organisation.
The camera is still perfect, and suits my needs to a tee, but finding a way to store the many large images we’ve been taking is becoming somewhat problematic. Since our main computer is a 733MHz G4 PowerMac with OS X 10.3, it seemed natural to use iPhoto. At first it was great… it allowed us to store images, burn them, share them between accounts, categorise them, etc., and even my wife could use it without any problems. But after the first thousand images of our newborn, it really began to slow down. Scrolling was almost painful with our favourite thumbnail sizes, the beachball would be forever spinning, iTunes would stutter, the occasional file would be corrupted, and our CPU usage went through the roof. Plus, the anal-retentive techie that I am, I was sorely conflicted between iPhoto’s ease of use (especially for my wife) and my need to organise photos into hierarchical directories.
Graphic Converter leaped out to me as a possible alternative. After all, it’s packed with hundreds of features, has a handy little “toolbox” for basic image manipulation, reads most different formats with ease, and it allows browsing through directories, thumbnails and other views. Somehow, though, it still seems like an image viewing application instead of a photo manager. For example, while I can edit the IPTC metadata in GC, I can’t see any obvious way of searching it. Also, the lack of “virtual folders” for collecting and sorting material (think the “albums” in iPhoto) is a definite drawback.
Meanwhile, the Canon ImageBrowser software that came with the camera has an OS 9 feel, the interface is rather clunky, and the capabilities are quite primitive. Photoshop Elements 2.0, which also came with it, is mainly a pared-down version of Photoshop and doesn’t allow much past the “browse” photos functionality. Photoshop 7.0 CS may be the ne plus ultra of photo editing, but the built-in file browser is slow, bloated, and doesn’t offer things like virtual folders. Plus, who wants to run the full Photoshop behemoth just to browse and categorise photographs?
A friend of mine that used to own a small graphic design company, and who has since sold several of his machines, mentioned to me that he had a spare license for Extensis Portfolio that I could use. Now, after a bit of asking around, it turns out that most of my designer friends are using Portfolio, so I figured that I had nothing to lose by giving it a try. I installed the software and started corralling the few hundred loose graphics I had kicking around my hard drive. I started exploring the interface, skimmed through the manuals, and viewed the good introductory tutorials at the Extensis website.
By way of comparison, iPhoto is to Portfolio what iMovie is to Final Cut Pro. The i-apps are certainly easy to use, have some great features for home use, and work well with other i-apps. But if you push them too far, either you’ll be ripping your hair out in frustration or things will begin to fall apart. In short, they are for typical consumer –and not professional– use. I wouldn’t want my wife to use Portfolio. It’s not that I doubt she has the intelligence to make effective use of it (after all, she is smarter than I), but she doesn’t have the patience or time –especially right now– to master any sort of technical application. And Portfolio has a definite learning curve, compared to iPhoto.
In the few days I’ve been using it, Portfolio does seem to have a few flaws: it occasionally quits for no reason; sometimes it doesn’t know how to create thumbnails from some of my JPEGs; there is no quick (or obvious?) way of doing small edits like cropping, flipping, or adjusting levels or colour; it relies on other programs to download images from my camera; and the “syncing” of folders to library can be a bit cumbersome.
These minor quibbles aside, Portfolio is probably the most powerful photo management software I’ve ever used. So far, with about a thousand images, it’s quite speedy, and I love the rather large pop-up previews of files. The metadata is easy to enter and to search. The program acts almost transparently with the OS, so I can drag’n'drop items directly onto dock icons to edit them. It not only synchronises with the file system, but it also has virtual folders (even based on search results), so it has the best of both worlds. It allows disk-based catalogue archiving, which is a necessity for managing hundreds of gigabytes of files. The print options are quite flexible and handy. The views (i.e., how the images and metadata are displayed) are highly customisable, and you can created your own named views. There also seems to be some decent server and webpage functionality built-in, but I haven’t bothered venturing into this territory yet.
Mind you, it doesn’t have some of the more user-friendly aspects of iPhoto. For example, you can’t do simple retouches or send images to your desktop background, but I never actually used these anyway (I retouch only in Photoshop or the GIMP), so I’m not missing much.
I’m going to continue using Portfolio for the next few weeks to see if this will be the ideal photo management system for me. Heaven knows, the price of $300 Cdn is not worth throwing away on anything less than a perfect application.
My wife, meanwhile, will continue using iPhoto, albeit with much fewer images. Time has proven that it’s certainly worth its price tag, as long as its limitations don’t become too overwhelming.
Any recommendations for other Mac-based photo management software? Drop a comment below or feel free to email me.
October 12th, 2004
From Paul Graham, the author of Hackers and Painters, comes an entertaining and tell-it-like-it-is article entitled The Age of the Essay. Graham’s writings straddle an ineresting line that runs between modern technology and the traditional realm of art and literature. Delving deeping into history, geography, aethetics and the precepts of creating art, and comparing what he finds to the development of technologies, he has a talent of bringing two often-disparate worlds together in a way that makes absolute sense.
Even if you aren’t technically-inclined, this piece is filled with good, honest and practical advice about writing essays and other non-fiction works.
October 2nd, 2004
I’m always on the lookout for bridges between English (and in particular, literature) and technology. However, the articles I come across usually concern how technology is applied to the study of literature or creativity. On Groklaw today, I found a well-written piece coming from the opposite direction: literature applied to technology.
For those who haven’t been following technology news, the story thus far in this strange soap opera: Linux is a product created by thousands of volunteers around the world, and is born of the Open Source philosophy of freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge. Last year, a firm named SCO (nee Caldera), a failing provider of Linux, and now a staunch advocate of its own UnixWare OS, claimed to own the intellectual property and copyrights behind the UNIX operating system, upon which Linux is modelled. They accuse IBM of “stealing” their code and contributing it to Linux, which has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years (to the dismay of Microsoft) and is a major focus of IBM, it all but decimating the market share for SCO UnixWare. SCO has threatened to sue Linux users all over the world for using their “property”, and has levied a lawsuit at IBM for several billion dollars (and well as initiating lawsuits against others such as Daimler-Chrysler). SCO stock, initially soaring to over $20 upon announcement of the longshot lawsuit, has been plummetting in recent months to now under $4, and the two major investors (the Royal Bank of Canada and BayStar Inc.) have cut their losses and walked away. The CEO, one Darl McBride, has been mouthing off about the legal issues quite regularly in the press, and is probably the “most hated man in IT” right now, due to the popularity of Linux among techies and advocates of freedom. SCO has been suffering many losses lately, and the courts, media, customers and investors have not been kind to them. The story gets far more complicated than that, and experiences twists and turns every day, but that is the gist of it. Groklaw is the community site set up to carefully watch and dissect the case, often digging up information that slowly puts nails into the SCO coffin.
That being said, here is the wonderful and hilarious send-up of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”, entitled “The Nazgul, A Derivative Work of the Intellectual Property of Edgar Allan Poe” by the Groklaw enthusiast Alanyst: The Nazgul.
September 21st, 2004
Probably the most interesting interview I’ve read in years: Salon.com has an article about Alan Moore (watch the cheesy Flash commercial to gain access). The author quite rightfully calls Moore not only one of the world’s best comic writers, but one of the world’s best writers, period. I am consistently awestruck by Moore’s output. In the 1980’s, this British writer transformed the medium of comic books from a pulpish world dominated by hack-jobs that would insult a child’s intelligence, to a form of high literature which even the New York Times has learned to take seriously. His tales turned a third-rate hollow character (the Swamp Thing) into a book that startled the whole industry and awakened the publishers to the fact that you can have a book aimed at an adult mind. His Watchmen showed us the “true lives” and neuroses of superheroes, making them real for the first time (in a way that Stan Lee, writing for teens, never could). His intricate and well-researched storylines in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and “From Hell” (both of which were shamed by their respective film versions) brought a power to the medium that imitators have yet to grasp. And the man continues to produce work that reinvents not only the industry, but our notions of humanity.
The interview examines Moore’s vision of today’s world, looks at how several of his works predicted current events such as “America’s War on Terror,” discusses the short-circuiting of reality with media, and reveals his thoughts on what an artist must do to prepare the world for the upcoming deluge of information that’s about to sweep us all away. A must-read, even if you haven’t heard of the man.
You can read a bio on his fan site.
July 22nd, 2004
Next Posts