Cutting Glass For Your Framed Photographic Art - A Real Challenge

If you regularly frame pictures for your hobby or business, you know how troublesome cutting glass is. Let's look at the challenges to cutting glass manually. If you use a straight edged ruler, and a handheld glass cutter, you will experience some or all of the following problems:

Accuracy - It is quite difficult to hold a ruler securely so that it doesn't "slip" while cutting. Making sure that you hold the glass cutter at the exact angle throughout the cut can be difficult. As you cut larger pieces of glass, these issues become more pronounced.

Cutting Work Space - Do you have the workspace to cut glass efficiently? It takes a good deal of room to lay out the glass and operate effectively. Consider the surface that you cut on. It must be large, steady and extremely flat. If the surface isn't sufficiently flat, you will likely unintentionally break the glass when you begin to cut.

Safety - When you have to work on a large sheet of glass, you open yourself up to potential physical damage. You might slip and cut yourself. You might drop the cut off piece onto your foot and cause damage to your foot or toes. You might have the large piece resting over the edge of the work table, and your customer or workmate might walk into the corner of the glass. These accidents happen.

Time - It takes time to measure twice and cut once. If you are accurate in your measurements, you don't let the ruler slip, and you hold the glass cutter at the exact angle throughout the cut, you will expend an inordinate amount of time to accomplish this task. Inefficient activity causes waste of time, money and it is trying.

Cost - Because you cannot cut glass efficiently, you will very likely make mistakes in measurements. You will have excessive breakage. You will cut glass that is not exactly the dimensions you intend. Consequently, you will end up trying to cut off an eighth inch of glass or make small trims to the glass. This is dangerous and is fraught with failure.

Methods people use to solve these problems - Buy pre-cut glass - If you don't have large volume needs, you can order glass cut to the exact sizes you need from your glass supplier. They will cut it professionally, and it will most likely fit. The cost, of course, will be higher. You won't be able to salvage larger cut off pieces for smaller framing jobs. Finally, you will have to wait until you get delivery - wasting time and money.

Practice with the ruler and handheld glass cutter until you get very skilled - If you have the time and physical strength, you can get very good at cutting glass with the ruler and straight edge. Many framers and framing shops do this as their normal method of cutting glass. It is a viable method of cutting glass - no doubt.

If you are serious about your business, or serious about your hobby, then buy a wall-mounted glass cutter machine.
A wall-mounted glass cutter will increase your accuracy because you don't have to worry about the measuring, holding the straight edge or how you hold the glass cutter.
Cutting large pieces of glass will be just as easy as cutting small pieces.
Glass cutting machines will be safer for you to operate, too.
It will take much less time to cut glass and your breakage costs will fall.
Certain models of glass cutter machines can not only be wall-mounted, but they will have a stand that will allow you to perform this operation away from walls. (In some smaller workshops, there isn't any wall space left.)

A good quality machine designed to cut glass will probably last a lifetime. If you buy one that is intelligently designed, you will be using it for years. Each cut you make will save you time, money, and frustration.

Just the Right Angle - A Photographic Perspective

While in Korea I learned that sometimes the best way to take a picture is to look like you're not taking a picture. With today's digital cameras that have LCD viewing screens that can twist, turn, or flip so that you can view the image at almost any angle it would have been much easier. At the time I did not have that privilege, so I was focusing by estimating distance. The average non-photographer assumes that if you don't have the camera up to your eye then you can't be taking a picture. People tend to relax, and you get more natural results.

When shooting pictures in a crowded area there are two angles that many photographers over look. The first is the waist level shot which we just mentioned above. The second involves putting your camera on a mono pod, using your self timer, and lifting your camera as far above the crowd as you can. This "bird's eye view" can often have interesting results.

When you are taking picture of a subject with a lot of straight lines, like someone against a wall or a fence for example, turn the camera itself at a 45 degree angle. Remember, straight lines tend to be boring. Diagonal lines on the other hand, are much more dramatic and will lead your eyes right to the subject.

If you are shooting a public event, like a wedding, it is always good to ask in advance, "Is there any location you do not want me to shoot from?" In most cases they will have no objection, and legally this helps protect you later on. Some of the best shots are usually found at some of the most unusual angles. Taking pictures from behind the minister and looking towards the couple as they take their vows for example. Most people attending will only get shots of the back of their heads at this point.

If you want to make something look larger than life and much more dramatic, try laying on your back and shooting straight up. Sometimes, it doesn't need to be that dramatic and standing on a step or getting down on one knee can make all the difference in the world.

The point of finding the right angle is not to be different for difference sake. The point is to find the angle that gives you the greatest insight to your subject. The right angle can be dramatic; the wrong angle can be boring. Often when you are looking for the perfect angle, you are looking for the one angle that has the least distractions in the background.

Postmodernism As An Artistic Space - The Photographic World Of Chezhin The Artist

Black and white photography (and, latterly, colour photography) always emphasises the dividing line marking the intersection between time(s) and space(s), the intersection and interpenetration of today and yesterday, today and tomorrow - of my life and someone else's. It points to the event experienced by a person (someone we know or don't know, myself, just someone, nature, or society as a whole) at the moment when my attention is directed at the rectangular frame recording that which has already been and gone and which is yet present in my life just so long as I am looking at (remembering) it.

Those who turn our life, the reality of our experience, into photographic images measure it as a news reporter does, give it aesthetic order as does a film director, and 'set up' frames to 'please the eye' - just as the archivist who acts as custodian of the past. And yet sometimes subordination to the past (not to history, i.e. not to past time in the form of events) turns out to be too confining a role for the photographer and he becomes an Artist. An Artist who subordinates to himself and his will time, space, and the reality of time and space, directing the facial expressions of the main actors in his art - i.e. time (considered as a flow of passing moments) and events. In his hands the camera, negatives/positives, exhibits, and other tools of trade become instruments in the attainment of higher goals. This is how it was that at some point in his photographic career Andrey Chezhin became not a master of artistic photography or some particular genre of photography, but an artist uplifted by the coloured wings of the style of our age - that style which the critics love to slate, postmodernism.

Andrey Chezhin's reincarnation occurred in the not so distant past, against the background of historic events that had broken the consciousness of generations condemned to witness the change of course undergone by the giant ghost ship USSR-Russia as it turned from socialism to capitalism and from total paralysis of its executive structures to idiocy.

It was o­nly natural that the consciousness of the photographer/artist-to-be should energetically throw off torpidity and slip out of its old skin. Simple recording of social reality accompanied by clicks of the camera shutter gave way to interest in staged photography and experiments with exhibits (sometimes as many as three or more). Furthermore, Chezhin needed a suitable object of investigation - complete with hands, legs, and heads etc.; and this, for lack of other candidates prepared to surrender themselves to the required extent, turned out to be the artist himself, ever obedient to and trustful of his own direction. It was at this time, at the end of the 1980s, that Chezhin's first composite works - Black Square (1988) and Red Square (1990) - made their appearance. These, of course, referred to Kazimir Malevich, a recent exhibition of whose works at the RussianMuseum had triumphantly signalled a new era in the history of art and, more specifically, the lifting of taboos o­n interest in various stages in the development of 20th-century art.

Black Square and Red Square are, as already noted, composite works, each being made up of four parts. They were conceived by Chezhin not as a photographic series or a frame by frame sequence, as in film, but as structural works where each part is no more than a brick supporting the overall equilibrium of the entire structure. The main character here is man. In the first case, man is depicted with a black square o­n his forehead/brain; in the second, he is shown taking off the fetters that bind him.

The first part of Red Square shows an individual standing upright with arms held out horizontally and legs placed wide apart. His figure is hemmed in (drawn round) at its extremities - which form the end points of a geometrical shape - by a line/rope which calls to mind Leonardo's quest for the 'golden section' in the proportions of the human body. The red square contains all the space whose contours are marked and defined by the rope-line; and the man is himself enclosed in this space. Then, in the next two parts of this work, he manages to free himself from the rope as his head, arms, and legs are liberated in turn, while, at the same time, the area of control exercised by the red square o­n the surface of the photograph grows progressively narrower. Finally, in the last part of this work, the rope/measure is seen lying inside he artist's workshop o­n a sheet of paper, within the red square. The viewer becomes a witness of how a cultural symbol - the 'red square', Malevich, Suprematism, etc. - is transformed into a sociocultural o­ne: the man casts off the rope - which initially marks the contours of a star (head, arms, legs) - and liberates himself from the red, i.e. throws off ideology (the rope/fetters/red - a sign of danger, as we remember). The red is overcome; man is free.

It was at this time, i.e. at the end of the 1980s - to be more exact, in 1988 - that Chezhin embarked o­n a series of self-portraits which is unfinished to this day. The artist photographs himself - with hair, without hair, with his wife, with a ruler; photographs his hands (in Erotica); photographs himself, himself, and himself. At the same time he started working o­n 'types' for his series Portraits (1990) and was continuing to record social reality (material that would be used in Pairs, a series executed in 1987-1990-1997).

Chezhin's absurd, significant, and meaningless staged photographs of nameless types/characters give off a powerful, unpleasant semiphysiological sense/memory of a past age of male and female functionaries and workers stamped with the distinctive marks of the limited, if not curtailed consciousness of social invalidism. Here Chezhin's photography emphatically avoids any attempt to convey the psychological state or mood of the subject; this is photography that stands outside pyschoanalysis or psychologism, outside any expression of the 'psychical'. These are still-lifes where things (objects) are credited with neither spirit nor personal time, nor personal experience or living space or 'physiognomy'. Individuality has been ironed out, leaving o­nly the overall characteristic grimace of types in socialist society. This is what they managed to achieve in the 70 years of Soviet rule. And Chezhin the artist here merely reflects the success enjoyed by the now deposed ideology in shaping the Soviet personality.

It is personality shaping that in my opinion is the subject of the series of works entitled Kharmsiada executed in 1995 for an exhibition called 'The absurd object. An exhibition of presents by St Petersburg artists to D. Kharms in honour of the 100th anniversary of his birthday'.

A brick face, facial features shorn off or sewn up with thread, a face transformed by a door handle or a drawing-pin: these and other pleasures associated with methods of forming 'new people' are used by Chezhin in this series to present a kind of handbook for incipient power-lovers or a diary of obedience - a warning to the 'masses', i.e. to precisely that material from which, it should be noted, all this is moulded. Man turns to plastic, Chezhin warns us, if he stops thinking and resisting the will outside him - if he forgets his own authenticity, essence, and individuality.

Especially interesting from this point of view is Chezhin's work o­n the creation of his epoch-making The Life of Drawing-Pins, which comprises the series Album for Drawing-Pins and The Drawing-Pin and Modernism. The drawing pin and its fellows are, as it turns out, highly convenient main characters in instances taken from daily experience/recording, absurd situations supplied by the artist and the reality that surrounds him. The unitary nature of the hero of the piece gives Chezhin unprecedented freedom to destroy individuality while setting up his own mythologised drawing-pin world, absurd to the point of recognizability, and while allowing the viewer to reach the conclusion - o­nly partly forced upon us by Chezhin himself - that 'we are all drawing-pins, my dear sirs ... '.

Chezhin's interest in personal expressions of humanity no doubt explains the constant use he makes of the genre of self-portraiture. Here we should observe a number of different stages in the artist's study of himself as a representative of the human and natural worlds and of reality itself: generalization; reduction to a common denominator; and individualization of the image (himself). Here there is no opposition set up between 'me' and 'they'. Chezhin is not concerned with asking himself 'me or someone else?'; instead, he is out to find an answer to the problem 'me' as 'they'. He studies man viewed statically - not in action and movement, but in the movement/change of time. What is important for him is the nature of man and the human body - not anatomy or anthropology as such, but man in his different dimensions, self-knowledge, and self-realizations (whether with a ruler or with or without hair).

The self-portraits of various different years, series, and cycles contain an element of play which comes out at transitional moments involving switches between, say, action/reality, artist/man, reality/photographic reality/artistic reality/deception/the reality of the artist's desire and of his creative effort and destiny.

In all the photographs in the series Self-Portraits (1988-1997), Andrey Chezhin's face is identical: the scarcely perceptible changes escape attention - even though Chezhin slips in, among the pile of material to be examined by the viewer, versions of himself both with and without hair. This deliberate recording of something intentionally, emphatically identical puts us o­n edge, causes our eyes to slow and steady in their tracks ...

As Modernism and Postmodernism have developed art has frequently in o­ne way or another confronted and dealt with issues relating to time, space, and movement as process. Man, the human body and its parts, and the face as that which expresses and contains man's essence have been recurring subjects for all kinds of artists and an object of general art discourse. But the o­nly example that comes to mind of an artist engaging in thorough self-examination and meticulous recording of himself, his 'I', and his face as the image of that 'I' dates to the 18th century and Mr. Rembrandt's self-portraits depicting mood, grimaces, etc.

For Chezhin the human being (the 'I') is an object in changing time and changed temporal space (which is practically non-existent), where the emphasis is o­n paradox, e.g. o­n the non-obligatory, casual nature of a situation, o­n the o­ne hand, and the significance of the moment recorded and its recording, o­n the other.

Another feature of Andrey Chezhin's interest in man (himself; the 'I' of his self-portraits) is the self-sufficient way in which, quite independently of everything external, the 'I' dissolves in a second person's world and that other person's world dissolves in the 'I' (here I could mention the three 1991 series called Your-mine, where female and male elements merge into a unified 'I'). Here the 'I' is the artist's 'I' and that of his wife. The viewer is presented with a conflict-free interpenetration of the male and that which has its beginning in woman, in nature. In Chezhin's work the self-portrait and depiction of man is an inexhaustible topic with many typical features. o­ne other such feature is Chezhin's use of sociocultural signs and their symbolic resonances - e.g. the red square, the black square, the rope, man, a recognizable urban landscape.

Chezhin's series of self-portraits present life as a series of changes in the artist. His multi-part work of self-observation Calendar (1990-1991) depicts a series of situations/days/incidences - in other words, routine daily life, - examining the idea of temporal changes experienced by a static subject in a situation where measurement of the passing of time is veiled. These works grow in time, with time, and with the artist.

In every structure/work created by Andrey Chezhin social reality undergoes change and there is a movement from state to state, a sliding before and after, an imperceptible movement from edge to edge. The series Pairs (1987-1997), for instance, comprises sheets composed in 1997 from pairs of snap photographs taken over the period 1987-1990. Together, they form a collection of works that are sign-like and legible. Their meaning is accessible o­n the basis of associations and sensations as Chezhin exploits mechanisms of perception, alogism, absurdity, logic, and direct and reverse sense-formation. Take, for example, the sheet Why am I not Fond of Moscow? At the top of this piece Chezhin has placed a photographic trick - a superimposition of o­ne of Chechulin's skyscrapers and a spreading birch tree. At the bottom, under the beautiful pattern formed by the branches of a shrub, a dead dog is seen lying o­n the ground. What could give a clearer or more expressive impression of the artist's lack of fondness for this city? The double denials, the absurd semantic situations, the fidelity of the image to reality, and the plastic coincidences /references: all this explodes correct, logical reasoning and judgement and finds an echo in the tonally correct way in which these pairs are perceived by the viewer. This is true of other sheets in the series too.

In his composite, multi-structure, cyclical work Transformations (1991-1997; cyclical in as much as a repetitive rhythm of beginning-end, beginning-end runs throughout) Chezhin sets up horizontal rows/films/moments. The heroes of these films are unchanging; what changes is the space around them, their surroundings, and the conditions governing the game or existence in which they are taking part. For example, Chezhin photographs the granite sphere o­n the spit of Vasil'evsky Island from all sides. And, seen from every side, the sphere is a sphere, but the space in which it is set changes dramatically round about - from ripples o­n water to architectural landscape.There could be no better illustration of Matyushin's theory of 'expanded looking'. Or take the sequence of clocks(street mechanisms/objects) photographed at particular moments in time. Here the main character is time and its attributes - dials, hands, and the structures that encase clock mechanisms. Or the subject could be seen as a film sequence: road-legs-road. And so o­n. In this composite work each line is a question whose resolution is possible o­nly for the given artist; a question/problem, moreover, which is to be dealt with not so much by resolving it as by living it through. Here you will find all the eternal questions posed by art in the 20th century: identification of o­neself and the world in o­neself; cognition of o­neself and the outside world; examination of the basic categories for constructing (and creating) the reality of o­ne's embodiment; the main questions of life and eternity; play in accordance with the laws of existence and contexts for such play; incidentalness and regularity. Finally, this work succeeds in personifying a sense of change in time and space and in space in time.

The photographic world created by the photographer and artist Andrey Chezhin likewise has room for the art of the comic strip, for a physiognomic constructor, for St Petersburg-as-city-and-text, and for geometric studies a la Esher. This world is vast, paradoxical, sometimes alogical (from the point of view of the ordinary person) - but fascinating. It is a space that acts like a vortex: you o­nly have to take the first step in its direction, become a little interested, and you find yourself unable to stop looking, you lose your way out as you blunder about the labyrinth of the artist's consciousness, jumping from level to level, from o­ne series of works to another, colliding with enigmas, laws, traps set by the carefully watching artist - and you gradually come to realize that the main hero of Chezhin's works is time. Time for him is an important category by which we get to know - and record - the world. It divides into seconds, moments, instants, units of experience. Time sets like a sticky, viscous mass or flows freely like a homogeneous substance - liquid, elastic, fluid. In the Self-Portraits of 1988-1997 time is an existential substance, an attribute of history and of the historical development of society and of man as representative of this society and as a part of its culture. The artist is able to move about in time; and this becomes o­ne of the ludic features of his work (the presence of the physical in real and non-real space; the artist's almost comic right to choose his own contemporaries - and their deeds - for himself). Likewise, he is able to impose simultaneity o­n events which are separated in time, as in the works Group Self-Portrait (1994) and Visiting Bulla (1994).

Time for Andrey Chezhin is expressed in specific objects. In his hands it is something with clearly marked, definite boundaries. These boundaries, though, are in the dimension not of man, but of history, in the specific time/happening of a given event in the history of this country and in abstract time in general, in the archaic, timeless, stagnant changelessness of man's presence in the world as he sets about discovering his own dimension. For Chezhin even today time is divided up into the smallest elements/units that flash past seen through a train window or o­n the screen of a television, computer, or other chronometric miracle of the kind that devours human time, genius, and intuition.

It is the movement of time that defines the characteristic space of Chezhin's works. In them space is real at every unit of time, but unreal, phantasmagoric, spectral at each post-unit of time-after-this-moment.

Space perceived, experienced, and recorded by equipment and man during the passing of time is in the power of the artist. This space changes at every moment of the advance of time, at every moment that this time is experienced by man, through the experiencing of this time in this space. The artist confronts the viewer not with the deformation of space, but with space that is changed over an extensive stretch of time.

There is nothing accidental in Chezhin's choice of compositional structure for his works. As a rule, they are composite structures that show man through multiplicity (e.g. Group Portrait or Transformations). The framework of these pieces is a living structure whose active influence is felt o­nly when its various elements form a semantic, plastic link with o­ne another. This link then becomes sensible; the elements of the structure feed and fuel o­ne another.

Time, space, man, object, play are the perpetual engines that drive the Petersburg photographer Andrey Chezhin's interest in attaining an equilibrium in the relation between 'the external world' and'the world in o­neself'. The artist uses his craft and photography as instruments. The photographer Andrey Chezhin is an artist of the end of the 20th century, the heyday of Postmodernism.

Expanding Your Photographic Creativity

Ultimate Photographic Creativity

"All parts of the universe are interwoven with one another, and the bond is sacred. Nothing is unconnected with some other thing." - Marcus Aurelius, 121-179 A.D

The subject of photographic creativity is, quite frankly, a frightening and difficult one to write about. I think that's part of the reason that discussion of photographic gear (Canon vs. Nikon vs. Pentax vs Sony; camera shootouts; lens tests; etc.) and photographic technique (how to pose portraits; how to use Photoshop; how to retouch pictures; etc.) probably outweighs discussion of photographic creativity 100 to 1, at least on the Internet.

I think that most photographers consider themselves very lucky when they make a beautiful photograph. (I might even extend this statement to all artists in general.) If they're brutally honest with themselves, most photographers would probably admit that they are missing a good 90% of the opportunities that regularly arise to make inspiring, interesting, or great photographs. I'd like to share a few thoughts as to why I think that is.

The goal of this article is to help get you thinking about some concrete ways to increase your receptivity to creativity. First, I'll introduce you to some ideas from the world of psychology, then I'll tell you what I think they mean in terms of increasing photographic creativity.

The Human System
In this article, I am going to borrow very liberally from some books by Stephen Wolinsky. If you have any interest at all in psychology, you owe it to yourself to check out Wolinsky's writings. I'll recommend a few books at the end of this article.

According to Wolinsky (and modern quantum physics!), everything is made of the same underlying substance. This substance would appear to the human perceptual apparatus as nothingness, or emptiness, or a void. Out of this one substance, the perceived manifestation arises in a way that is like gas (water vapor) condensing down into a liquid (water, or H20), and then further condensing down into a solid (ice). Seemingly solid things in the perceived manifestation then "thin out" into what appears as nothingness. And this is the cycle of living, as we directly experience it. We might have ideas or concepts to the contrary, but the actual direct experience of living is pretty much the successive arising and subsiding of apparent objects, sensations, and thoughts within our awareness. And there is also the arising and subsiding of awareness itself as we awaken from sleep and return to sleep.

If we classify the ways that nothingness manifests into "something," we might get a classification like the following:

The Outside World (other people, the computer screen, the desk, the house, etc.)



Thoughts (mental images, the voice(s) inside your head, memories, concepts, beliefs, etc.)



Emotions (anger, sadness, fear, etc.)



Human Biology (the needs of the human body, the nervous system, fight/flight responses, survival responses, etc.)



Spiritual Essence or States of Grace (unconditional love, peace, compassion, pure beingness, etc.)



The Collective Unconscious (the realm of archetypes, the forces that connect the whole human family, etc.)



The Void of Undifferentiated Consciousness (the state of the one underlying substance before it has condensed into something we can be aware of)



And finally, we'd probably create a catch-all bucket for everything that exists but is beyond classification. All sorts of labels could be chosen, including: Universal Intelligence; God; The Universe; The Self; etc.


To get something from this article, there is no need for you to accept the particular classification system above. It's just labels for the un-labelable; categories for the indivisible anyway! At the end of the day though, I think that most people agree that a human being is made up of many parts, or forces, or experiences that feel related but different. That's what makes being a human being so interesting in the first place!

Now, as a human being, would you be happy if you woke up one morning missing a part of your body? I doubt most people would be happy at all about that! But every day most of us amputate huge portions of our daily experience for one reason or another. Read on for some ideas about how we do this psychic amputation.

Trances
Most people think of Trances as unusual states, where a person becomes semi-unconscious and has some strange or mystical experience that only they are aware of. That describes less than 1% of the trances that actually happen.

The other 99% of trances happen all the time to everybody.

A trance is a state where a person's attention is narrowed (focused on only one thing) and fixated (not free to focus on other things).

Milton Erickson gives us the following definition of a trance state:

"Trance is a condition wherein there is a reduction of the patient's foci of attention to a few inner realities; consciousness has been fixated and focused to a relatively narrow frame of attention rather than being diffused over a broad area."

How many times does that happen to you in a day? For most people, at least 100 times per day!

Here's an example that might apply to some of us: You are at work and unexpectedly called into your manager's office. Your manager explains that your work performance has been lower than expected, and asks you how you plan to fix this problem. Immediately, you begin to hesitantly talk about how things have been difficult with a family situation, and you are sure this is temporary and things will get better. As you talk, your palms begin to sweat a bit, and you have this awful fear that you'll be fired if you don't come up with a good explanation.

Later, in thinking about this situation, you realize it reminds you of how your father, when you were young, would call you into his study and get on your case about your grades. You realize that you had an age regression trance, and you began reacting to your work supervisor in the same way you learned to react to your father when you were young, combined with a narrowed and fixated focus.

For example, while you were explaining things to your supervisor, you realize you didn't notice the comfortable chair you were sitting in, the sunshine and the birds signing outside your supervisor's partially opened window, or the delicious aftertaste of the special lunch you treated yourself to. Although the sensory data for those things was present, your awareness was narrowed and fixated on something else!

By the way, a trance is not necessarily a bad thing. A trance state that helps you survive a truly dangerous situation is certainly not a bad thing. I would suggest, though, that a trance that happens automatically in a non-survival situation may not be allowing you the full freedom possible in that situation.

Let's take another example. For a long time, I was a huge fan of Edward Weston. I've read his Daybooks (the published version of his personal diaries), seen every photograph of his I could get my eyeballs on, visited Mexico City to see some of the neighborhoods where he lived, and photographed at Point Lobos where some of his most famous photographs were made.

For a while, I was living an "Edward Weston" trance! This was a time where my attention was fixated on comparing my life with what I knew of Edward Weston's life. My attention was narrowed so that I looked for photographs that reminded me of Weston's photographs, I tried to live in situations that reminded me of his bohemian living situations, and I idealized a life that looked like his. In the process, I partially lost contact with what was real and what was happening in my personal world moment to moment.

Any perceptual input that arose to me and did not fit my "Weston filter" would have been immediately discarded, before I could even freely decide whether to discard it. I was truly living an "Edward Weston trance!" Any uniquely creative photographs that were asking to be made by me would have to slip past the filters of this massive trance state of mine. Who knows how many creative opportunities I missed during that time!

Perception and the Human System
The human nervous system comprises the ability to see, taste, touch, hear, and smell. The primary purpose of the human nervous system is to ensure the survival of the human species, and especially the particular member of the human species attached to that nervous system! Although the nervous system makes possible many awesome experiences (enjoyment of delicious food, enjoyment of a loving caress, smelling the proverbial roses, etc.), it's primary purpose is to ensure human survival.

80% of our attention goes to the sense of sight. Most photographers rely exclusively on their sense of sight when finding, selecting, and composing photographs. Well, that and their mind.

The mind is an outgrowth of the human nervous system. Although the human mind is the primary reason that life today is so much more comfortable for so many (those above the poverty level) than it was hundreds of years ago, the mind is truly an outgrowth of the nervous system. Most people have almost no control over the thoughts that go through their mind.

Prove it to yourself: think of nothing but the chair you are sitting on right now for the next 5 minutes. I'll be back in five minutes to check how things went.

Well, how did that experiment go? Do you still believe that you control the contents of your mind?

Here's the point: if you only rely on your optical system and the contents of your mind for photographic inspiration, creativity, or guidance, you are missing a huge slice of potential sources for photographic creativity! Have a look again at how I categorized the world of manifestation:

The Outside World



THOUGHTS



Emotions



HUMan Biology



Spiritual Essence or States of Grace



The Collective Unconscious



The Void of Undifferentiated Consciousness



Universal Intelligence; God; The Universe; The Self; etc.


Notice that in this list, I have bolded Thoughts, and part of the word Human Biology. This is to point out that the normal way of guiding photographic creativity is to look to the mind, and to a part of the human biology (the optical system).

Here's what I'm really trying to say (sorry I had to give so much background information to get to this point): Every item on the list above is a potential source of guidance towards amazingly creative, inspiring, beautiful, and simply GREATphotographs!

Relying only on the eyes, or the eyes plus the mind, for photographic creativity is a bit like being in a trance state: your attention is narrowed and fixated compared to what it could be if your were receiving perceptual data from the other aspects of our world.

Can bodily sensations guide creativity? How about dreams? What about a recurring interest in stories of a mythical or imaginary nature? Could an ability to be grateful for or at peace with or in love with everything you experience moment to moment be an opening to creativity?

The answer is YES. Nothing is unconnected. Every "thing" that manifests in your awareness is a potential opening or guide towards creativity in photography (or artmaking in general). It doesn't have to be just a thought or a visual perception.

On the other hand, let's think about the things that can be corrosive to creativity. How about unresolved emotional issues? How about a nagging pain in your body that the doctor's haven't been able to explain? How about a mind that obsessively or compulsively focuses on problems that "must" be solved?

Can these things diminish your access to creativity? The answer is YES. Every thing that reduces your ability to experience the totality of your personal world moment to moment is a potential restriction on creativity.

Can you dissolve these blocks to creativity? The answer is YES.

John Wimberley

I met master photographer John Wimberley in 2006. I had signed up for a brand new weekend-long workshop he was putting on: Sight & Insight. That workshop opened my awareness to some of the things I've discussed in this article. And it started me on my own personal exploration of how I could be more open to creativity.

The results have been truly transformative. I'm going again to John's Sight & Insight workshop this October (2009). John tells me that the workshop has evolved every time he's taught it, and I can't wait to see what new insights he presents in Newport, OR this October!

P.S. Many accomplished photographers teach excellent workshops. I've been to several John Wimberley workshops, and two things stand out: the EXCELLENCEof the teaching and the information provided. And second, the PRICE! I've never had to pay more than $300 to participate in a John Wimberley workshop and I can tell you that they'd be a bargain at three times that price.

My own photographs have improved dramatically as a result of John Wimberley's workshops, and all I can tell you is that if you're serious about improving your photography, you need to sign up now for the Sight & Insight workshop. I'm planning on encouraging all of the artists I know, photographer or not, to attend!