8 Feb
12:16
∞

zachmcnair asked: What do you do to keep yourself inspired?
& What do you do to keep yourself organized?

Let me expand ::
You've been shooting & designing for years now, and where most creatives would find a niché and stick to it, you have continued to push the limits while not losing your head.

I believe I know at least part of your answer, but I'm always thankful to hear things in repetition.

Much love, brother.

I’m not sure what it is I do to remain inspired, other than the fact that the more I learn about anything, the fuller the realization that I know very little at all. But I’m not sure even that should be called inspiration.

A great deal of things inspire me (daily — hourly!), and, I believe everything I experience informs me creatively. But there’s no formula to that and relying on inspiration will not yield the type of consistency or discipline the creative process requires.

I have to believe that ethic of work is not superseded by the value you place on ingesting the work of others. The motivation to continue on in your particular role as an artist must be one internal. Creative implies the opposite of consumption.

In order to be consistently creative and pushing forward (this is not to say I am as much as it is to say what I want) I think simply that it’s in my best interest to study and understand the giftings of others, while also understanding how my gift is particular and unique, commit to stewarding that gift, and working hard to cultivate it.

Organization? It’s the moderation of paramater and freedom. I’m not quite sure I’ve ever had one solid system in place. However, I’ve always thought it valuable to have things in some sort of order (and especially, of course, when it comes to freelancing and dealing with clients).

Some sort of system is necessary, and within any system are boundaries that maintain order and structure, and help you become more consistent as an artist and a professional.

However, I’ve found the trick is to allow yourself enough freedom that you don’t become oppressed by your own system. That’s called perfectionism, and it kills any hope for creativity.

The goal with organization — as it is with most things — is balance.

Practically, I use Things for task and project management and all things Google to keep all emails, documents, and calendars in a central, universally-accessible location.

8 Feb
09:27
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Anonymous asked: your work is inspiring. what lenses do you use on a typical wedding gig? DenMark

A variety of prime lenses between the length of 24mm & 85mm. I don’t use zooms, and I always explain the implications of this approach to my clients in advance.

8 Feb
05:54
∞

I, Me, Mine (by Frank Chimero)


I remember the exact moment my perception of the world switched into “grown-up mode.”

I was a sophomore in college, sitting in class, doing the usual Monday morning catch-up with my classmates. A good friend started talking about a crazy dream she had had the previous night. No specifics were spared: how David Duchovny showed up in a semi-truck, how he was going to drive her to a dentist appointment, how he was wearing a red shirt, and how he had a French accent. It was a quagmire of a conversation. I sat there wondering when it would end, and stupefied with how I got into this spot to begin with.

But then, something scary happened. The projection of judgement hit her and came right back at me. A thought popped into my head. Judgement had been passed. “Oh god,” I thought, “No one cares when I talk about the dreams that I have either.” Value isn’t always mutual in communication.

Adulthood comes with responsibility and empathy. And I realized I had been blowing off something huge: responsibility to an audience. Suddenly, I felt very small as a person, and the parroting about the importance of audience in design school made me realize that maybe these classes might teach me something more valuable than ems and ens, colors and kerning.

I think a lot of us understand the importance of empathy to an audience. But often, we (or at least I) forget to suggest that it is natural and beneficial to impose limits on the scope of the audience. The internet allows us to share everything with everyone. While great most of the time, the ubiquity means we’ll come in contact with things more frequently that are not for us specifically. The scale of sharing on the internet makes us face two scary ideas.

The first is that to do good work, a person will exclude people from a conversation they start. The second is that you yourself will be excluded from something, and by you not being a consideration, the work will be better. Ouch. Both ideas are equally terrifying, because they make me feel small. Just like my revelation on conversations about dreams.

The thoughts are scary because the message is clear: each one of us is not the center of the universe. It’s a trite ideal repeated often by those-who-have-their-act-together to those-who-do-not, but I never really started thinking about how it applies to the idea of audience until recently.

Some people will always misunderstand what a communicator is saying or trying to do. Some people are, irreconcilably, absolutely freaking nuts and want to make everything offensive or dramatic or insulting. On the internet, these folks are called “trolls.” They live in basements, survive on Cheeto dust and are the most reviled passengers on the Good Ship Internet. They spawn and thrive in YouTube comments and show up on or call in to shouty news programs out of addiction to outrage. There’s a feeling of entitlement to suitability. Everything must be perfectly for them. The wrath grows if the troll is tantalizingly close to the intended audience, but still on the peripheral.

Maybe customization, capitalism, and self-help have helped to woo us to the idea that maybe, just maybe, each one of us could be the center of our own universe. But then, as close as we get, we’re presented with something that short-circuits that delusion, and we’re reminded that we can never be the center of it all. There are just too many people and opinions here, and we’re just not big enough to have things orbit around us.

It’s scary to not be the center. My “dream sequence” forced me to flirt with the idea that everyone around me is sometimes bored when listening. Talk about being brought down to scale. No one likes to be minimized or excluded. But, as a maker, it becomes crucial to exclude some others if you want to make good work. You can’t please everybody. And, as a consumer, you will be excluded from things you wish not to be. You can’t have everything. And you’ll have to swallow being excluded, if you believe in quality. Sometimes, removing you from the equation makes things better for everyone else.

All eyes are not created equal. As a person who makes things, it takes courage to say that the thing you are making is not for this group of eyes. And, as a consumer, it takes an adult to say that sometimes you’re just not who something was made for.

(viafrank)