Seth relates a story about where good ideas come from:
“Someone asked me where I get all my good ideas, explaining that it takes him a month or two to come up with one and I seem to have more than that. I asked him how many bad ideas he has every month. He paused and said, “none.”
And there, you see, is the problem.”
Sounds a lot like photography advise: the best way to get a good photograph, is to just take a lot of pictures.
Seth started collecting “pictures of crowds stunned by a baseball bat heading their way”. The strange thing: it is possible to collect such pictures. He writes Getting used to infinity:
All of us grew up in a world of content scarcity, and now we live in a world of content infinity. [...] It means that finding a photo of what you’re looking for isn’t the hard part, it’s deciding what to look for in the first place.
The same could be said for just about anything. Music, Kitchen Appliances, or Software Development Tools. Deciding what to look for – or where to start – is the hard part. Call it the role of the curator. The ability to understand what you want before you know how to find it – is much more important in every field.
Matt discusses how to take a great photo: Take 36 pictures and throw away all but 1.
When you edit ruthlessly like that, you come out with great results. People think you’re better than you are. It’s not that you became a brilliant photographer, it’s just that you started exercising taste and restraint.
It’s the same reason I advocate trying software instead of deciding to try. Matt continues:
What you leave out is often what turns good into great. What you leave out is the difference between something that is either 1) never seen or used or 2) simple, clear, and actually digestable. It’s true for photography. It’s true for features in software. And it’s true for plenty more too.
Or perhaps more succinctly:
“The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” -Linus Pauling
“Unphotographable is a catalog of exceptional mistakes. Photos never taken that weren’t meant to be forgotten. Opportunities missed. Simple failures. Occasions when I wished I’d taken the picture, or not forgotten the camera, or had been brave enough to click the shutter.” – Photographer Michael David Murphy
Todays Unphotographable:
“This is a picture I did not take of a homeless man who was a daily visitor to our dumpster, right outside the apartment where a burglar had stolen all my cameras a few months ago, rendering everything unphotographable, and the man had retrieved a chair from the dumpster, a chair we’d thrown-out because it was broken and we were moving and had no more use for it, and the man was sitting out by the dumpster, reclined in the chair, slowly paging through my catalog from KEH Camera Brokers.”
I posted about these things once, and more than a year later I still think they are every bit as relevant and important as when I first posted them. If you missed them then, perhaps you’ll enjoy them now.
REDUX POSTS FROM JAN and FEB 2007
Use Flickr to share your digital photos with friends and family
Flickr is a “Web 2.0″ site that let’s you share photos. What I like most about it is that it is really easy: after I import photos from my camera, I drop a few in an email and send it to my flickr email address. The photos are then automatically posted to my page without ever needing to open a browser. Picts of my kids are here.
Gmail: A new way of looking at email
Gmail fundamentally changed the way I approach my email – for the better. If you aren’t using this for your home email, check it out. It’ll be weird at first, and then you’ll quickly wonder how you ever did without it. The spam filtering alone is worth it’s weight in gold (it saved me from reading 1706 spams in the last 30 days).
monthly email
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