5 Ways To Use Abstraction

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1 – Simplify

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2 – Clarify A Structure

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3 – Show A Process

 
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4  – Visualize A Concept

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5 – Create A Pattern

To one degree or another, every photograph is abstract. At a minimum, photographs are flat rather than three-dimensional. Some photographs are more graphic than others, and the origins of a few photographs are virtually unrecognizable. Determining to what degree a photograph is abstract, how it is abstract, and why it’s abstract will help you understand more about it and its creator’s intentions; this might be you.
Abstraction can serve many functions: it can direct, structure, inform, and express.
Whether you use it a little or a lot, abstraction is a vehicle that can help you strengthen your stories and clarify your point of view. As every image is abstract to one degree or another, ultimately, the question is not whether you will use abstraction but how you will use abstraction in your images. Exploring abstraction is time will spent.
Read the full article on Craft & Vision.
Learn more in my creativity and digital photography workshops.
 
 

56 Great Quotes On Success

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on Success.
“Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.” – Arnold H. Glasow
“For success, attitude is equally as important as ability.” – Harry F. Banks
“Your attitude, not your aptitude, will determine your altitude.” – Zig Ziglar
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Albert Schweitzer
“Don’t aim for success if you want it; just do what you love and believe in, and it will come naturally.” – David Frost
“Action is the foundational key to all success.” – Pablo Picasso
“The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.” Mark Caine
“Success is loving life and daring to live it.” – Maya Angelou
“The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.” Henry Ford
“Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.” – George Sheehan
“I’ve come to believe that each of us has a personal calling that’s as unique as a fingerprint – and that the best way to succeed is to discover what you love and then find a way to offer it to others in the form of service, working hard, and also allowing the energy of the universe to lead you. ” ― Oprah Winfrey
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26 Quotes On Personal Callings

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on personal Callings.
“I believe there’s a calling for all of us. I know that every human being has value and purpose. The real work of our lives is to become aware. And awakened. To answer the call.” ― Oprah Winfrey
“Emptiness is a symptom that you are not living creatively. You either have not a goal that is important enough to you, or you are not using your talents and efforts in striving toward an important goal.”– Maxwell Maltz
“We are not in a position in which we have nothing to work with. We already have capacities, talents, direction, missions, callings.”– Abraham Maslow
“We shall never learn to feel and respect our real calling and destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider everything as moonshine, compared with the education of the heart.”– Sir Walter Scott
“I have brought myself by long meditation to the conviction that a human being with a settled purpose must accomplish it, and that nothing can resist a will which will stake even existence upon its fulfillment.”– Benjamin Disraeli
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” – Confucius
“Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do. With such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling.” – Virgil
“Somewhere someone is thinking of you. Someone is calling you an angel. This person is using celestial colors to paint your image. Someone is making you into a vision so beautiful that it can only live in the mind. Someone is thinking of the way your breath escapes your lips when you are touched. How your eyes close and your jaw tightens with concentration as you give pleasure a home. These thoughts are saving a life somewhere right now. In some airless apartment on a dark, urine stained, whore lined street, someone is calling out to you silently and you are answering without even being there. So crystalline. So pure. Such life saving power when you smile. You will never know how you have cauterized my wounds. So sad that we will never touch. How it hurts me to know that I will never be able to give you everything I have.” – Henry Rollins
“Most of us would like to end our lives feeling both that we had a good time and that we left the world a little better than we found it.”– Philip Slater
“The role of the teacher remains the highest calling of a free people. To the teacher, America entrusts her most precious resource, her children; and asks that they be prepared… to face the rigors of individual participation in a democratic society.”– Shirley Hufstedler
“The growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership.”– Harvey S. Firestone
“The practice of medicine is an art, not a trade; a calling, not a business; a calling in which your heart will be exercised equally with your head. Often the best part of your work will have nothing to do with potions and powders, but with the exercise of an influence of the strong upon the weak, of the righteous upon the wicked, of the wise upon the foolish.” – William Osler
“Art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.” – John Fitzgerald Kennedy
“If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.” ― Émile Zola
“I don’t tell you this story today in order to encourage all of you in the class of ’04 to find careers in the music business, but rather to suggest what the next decade of your lives is likely to be about, and that is, trying to ensure that you don’t wake up at 32 or 35 or 40 tenured to a life that happened to you when you weren’t paying strict attention, either because the money was good, or it made your parents proud, or because you were unlucky enough to discover an aptitude for the very thing that bores you to tears, or for any of the other semi-valid reasons people marshal to justify allowing the true passion of their lives to leak away. If you’re lucky, you may have more than one chance to get things right, but second and third chances, like second and third marriages, can be dicey propositions, and they don’t come with guarantees…. The question then is this: How does a person keep from living the wrong life?” ― Richard Russo
“The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.” ― Annie Dillard
“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.” ― Wendell Berry
“If God gives you something you can do, why in God’s name wouldn’t you do it?” ― Stephen King
“Change makes you find your calling, your legacy, and God’s divine plan for your life. Don’t run from it.” – Iman
“Whatever your calling is as a service, follow it – that’s beautiful.” – Hill Harper
“Every calling is great when greatly pursued.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
“…it sounds like life is calling you to do something BIG and you haven’t picked up the phone.”– Anonymous
“Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.”– Henry David Thoreau
“Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.”– Henry David Thoreau
“Let us become the change we seek in this world.”– Mohandas Gandhi
Explore The Essential Collection Of Creativity Quotes here.
Discover more quotes in my social networks.

33 Great Quotes On Excellence

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on excellence.
“Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” – Booker T. Washington
“We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.” – Barack Obama
“It is the nature of man to rise to greatness if greatness is expected of him.” – John Steinbeck
“He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it. Dream lofty dreams and as you dream so shall you become.” – James Allen
“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.” – W. Somerset Maugham
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37 Great Quotes On Feeling

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on feelings.
“Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” – Agnes Martin
“If there is no feeling, there cannot be great art.” – Ray Bradbury
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” – William Wordsworth
“Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.” – Edward Steichen
“Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.” – Alan Moore
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” – Ingmar Bergman
“I pay no attention whatever to anybody’s praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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Alumn Olaf Willoughby On Collaboration & Creativity 1

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Olaf Willoughby
The Creative Space, Part One
Imagine yourself in a favourite photo location. Maybe for you that is Street shooting in Bangkok or Brooklyn. Or for this post I’ve chosen a beautifully backlit waterfall in Iceland. You excitedly pull out your camera and start shooting. You already know that you’ll get at least some good images. You smile inside at the expectation of processing, posting and printing. Right. Job done. Where to next?
This is a well trodden path which produces some great images and good friendships. But this time let’s not rush off. Instead let’s pause, rewind and consider some alternative scenarios. Consider that location as an empty ‘creative space’ waiting to be filled with an interpretation.

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Now imagine a painter walks into that scene. How would she see the light, the movement and the colours? She has the advantage of being able to add and subtract elements on the spot whereas photographers can mostly only do that in post processing. Which elements might she accentuate and how?
Now rewind and imagine a poet enters the same creative space. He has more leeway to convey the full sensory impressions; the deafening sound of the waterfall and the delicate touch of the spray. The poet might consider how in Iceland it is easy to feel a deep connection to the elemental forces of nature. How trolls might live in the rocky recesses of the mist covered mountains. Is there a photographic equivalent to this kind of inspiration?
Finally, rewind again and imagine you are a composer entering the space. What kind of mood could you conjure up with the full complement of musical instruments at your disposal, ? How do you capture the majesty of a landscape? As Gustav Mahler said when a colleague enthused about the view of the lake and mountains from his cabin at Attersee in Austria, ‘Don’t bother looking at the view – I have already composed it’. How can we approach a fuller sense of the potential of the scenes in front of our cameras?
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You get the point. When we are in our personal photographic creative spaces we are seeing only one small part of the creative whole. A good analogy would be our eyesight where visible light is only a small part of the total electromagnetic spectrum, only one version of reality. There is more to be seen.
Similarly each of the artists above will interpret the magic of that creative space in very different ways. Whilst this is a simple point to understand intellectually, very few of us are skilled in a variety of artistic disciplines. So to expand into any of these spaces seems in practice almost impossible.
And this is one of the much debated issues in photography as an art form. The instrument itself is quite limited. Yes we can stray into impressionism with camera movement, into the surreal with multiple exposures and blend modes and into metaphor with ‘equivalents’ (http://www.moma.org/ collection/works/44200?locale=en)
But these are ‘technical’ solutions and only slightly change how we think about and see our images. So how can we bring some of that artistic inspiration available to other disciplines, back into photography? How can we enlarge the creative spaces we inhabit to energise our work?
There is a way that Eileen McCarney Muldoon and I have developed and teach in our workshop, ‘Visual Conversations’. The principles are covered in part two of this post to be published next weekend.
Meantime if you’d like more information on the workshop please check here:
Visual Conversations
July 10th – 16th, Maine Media College, Rockport, USA
Aug 23rd – 25th, Leica Studio, London, UK 
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60 Great Quotes On Color

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Enjoy this collection of quotes on color.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Share it in the comments.

 

“Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, color is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.”
- John Ruskin

“In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.”
- Hans Hofmann

“Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else – by color.”
- Paul Cezanne

“Color helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain.”
- Henri Matisse

“Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.”
- Paul Klee

“Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.”
- John Ruskin

“The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?”
- Richard P. Feynman

“The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they 'really' have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.”
- Bertrand Russell

“Color creates, enhances, changes, reveals and establishes the mood of the painting.”
- Kiff Holland

“Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”
― Wassily Kandinsky

“The chief function of color should be to serve expression.”
- Henri Matisse

“Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.”
- Oscar Wilde

“Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”
- Pablo Picasso

“All colors arouse specific associative ideas…”
- Yves Klein

“Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body.”
- Wassily Kandinsky

“Colors produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance.”
- Wassily Kandinsky

“Colors express the main psychic functions of man.”
- Carl Gustav Jung

“Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams.”
- Paul Gauguin


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