Impulse

I’ve been inspired by Jay Maisel (via Epson Online Experience) to do visual pushups each day. He sug­gests not only bring­ing your cam­era with you every­where, but also set­ting aside time daily to just pho­to­graph any­thing. This rec­om­men­da­tion goes along with advice by Elliott Erwitt that I had recently read: that you will improve only by keep­ing work­ing. So, I’m going to give it a go.
Of course, I’ve tried this before and failed to get through an entire week. Looking back, I had all kinds of avoid­able rea­sons excuses:

• I assigned too much mean­ing to it. Once, inspired by Robert Hume Kennerly’s book Photo du Jour, I tried to keep a pho­to­graphic jour­nal. Each day I would to cre­ate a pho­to­graph that rep­re­sented my day; a visual doc­u­ment of my exis­tence. So, it had to have mean­ing. It had to have impor­tance. It had to be good. So, I never took a pic­ture. My expec­ta­tions were too high — it’s just prac­tice after all. I’d hardly expect that each of Yo Yo Ma’s daily prac­tice ses­sions could become a plat­inum sell­ing CD. There’s a dif­fer­ence between grandiose and just screw­ing around.
• I pro­cras­ti­nated. Have you watched this movie yet? Have you got­ten sick of me men­tion­ing it?
• I invented cre­ative bar­ri­ers. “The light sucks.” “I don’t feel cre­ative.” “It’s rain­ing so nobody’s going to be out­side.” These are all excuses. As zen-master pho­tog­ra­pher Mike Manzano often told me, you have to look at your dis­ad­van­tages cre­atively and turn them into advan­tages. Plus, I live in Seattle — time to get used to the rain.
• I invented tech­ni­cal bar­ri­ers. “It’s sunny out and I’ve got a pushed roll of 1600 in the cam­era.” “I don’t think anything’s going to be good, I should shoot dig­i­tally but I don’t have a good dig­i­tal cam­era.” “I don’t want to carry around all those lenses.” (Maisel’s got a great anti­dote to this: “As soon as I looked through the lens, I real­ized I wanted the other lens back. But that’s always what hap­pens.”). Similar to the cre­ative bar­ri­ers, these are just excuses. A cam­era is a dark box with a hole in it and a bit of glass. That’s all it is. It’s the art of wrap­ping a frame around some­thing in the real world and know­ing pre­cisely when to snap that frame. I don’t need all the fancy gear to do that.

So, I’ll keep all this in mind and take another shot. For this first trial week, I’ll try to update this post with my favorite pics. Well, the ones I shoot dig­i­tally, that is. Chemical pics, like those I shot today, to come later.
I sup­pose it’s more blog­gish to do sep­a­rate post­ings for each, but my brain is overly hier­ar­chi­cal after 15 years in the com­puter indus­try and blogs don’t lend them­selves to nest­ing…
Update: Couldn’t resist:

Update: I’ve decided to put daily pics up on Flickr instead of con­tin­u­ously updat­ing this post. Click me.

Related posts:

1. Followup: Visual Pushups
2. A lit­tle more action, please