Having trouble getting more out of your photography? Perhaps the answer is to do less.
I am a huge fan of podcasts. Perhaps to a very high level. In fact, one of the sad truths of math is that there simply aren’t enough hours in a day to listen to all that there is. I’m not listening just to buy time. Rather, I am one of those people who loves to learn about everything. Everything really. And I find the long-form podcast format a great way to really dive into the issues and crux of a topic and provide the right context to make it applicable to the real world.
Other times, podcasts are less informative and more thought-provoking. Whether that is the purpose of the podcast or not is another story. But, often, I will listen and something the moderator has to say sparks my brain in a different direction and inspires me to see things from a different angle. This happened twice this weekend. Once, while listening to a discussion about the movie Anything Anywhere Anytime above Cinema has meaning audio file. Then again, a few days later, while listening to Shankar Vedantam’s social science podcast, Hidden brain.
I won’t give you all the details. I encourage you to check them out for good listening. But both volumes deal with the idea of more popular consumption and the tendency for people to always want more. Feeling unsatisfied? More money should be the answer. Don’t get the photo you want? Adding a device should be the answer. Whatever may happen to us, the answer we come up with always seems to be some form of complementarity.
I’ll give you an example from the Hidden Brain podcast. Fair warning, I’ll dissect the details. I’m neither a neuroscientist nor a person with a photographic memory, but here’s the gist. An architect is doing an experiment. He’s trying to build homes in a more efficient and cost-effective way, while offering better stability and cooling. To solve the problem, he hired a team of designers to come up with solutions to the problem. His intention is to choose the best one. However, based on the needs of the project, all the designers he hired had difficulty returning to a design that would improve on the original without significantly adding costs. They added a little bit here and a little bit there. They tried using different materials. They tried expanding this room and that room. But nothing worked.
Then, one day, someone came up with an answer. At first, the change in winning idea wasn’t so obvious. In fact, the design looks very similar to the original. But it still cuts costs, increases insulation, and takes less time to build. So what for? Simply put, the designer came up with a way to use hollow blocks for the foundation of the house rather than solid blocks. As simple as that. Because the mass of the weight on the blocks occurs around the edges, the use of hollow blocks does not destabilize. The hollow chamber in the center of the blocks somehow retained the airflow (I won’t even begin to explain this) resulting in better insulation. And, by not filling blocks, architects can significantly cut both building materials and assembly time. Literally less is more.
Certainly, it will be a long time before I can afford to build a house. But I have to consider how we usually approach problem solving in photography. Like architects who build homes, our natural inclination as humans is to constantly throw in one more problem to fix it. If the footage didn’t work, we wondered where we could add more light. Having trouble getting to the heart of a topic? What lenses can I buy to improve my viewing angle? Whatever the problem, it can certainly be solved easily if we have more resources at our disposal.
But, like the house example, a lot of times we overlook the obvious. Certainly, supplementation could be the answer to our current predicament. But rarely do we consider doing less. And sometimes deciding to do less can be the key to unlocking even our biggest obstacles.
It may not be obvious, but a lot of the positive events in my career have been the result of taking away instead of adding. For example, the first set of major awards I won was for a dance project I worked on years ago in and around Los Angeles. Even as a beginner, I already had more than enough tools in my arsenal to play with in terms of gear. I still don’t know how to use all those tools correctly. But that is a story for another day.
This particular project saw me photograph dancers across the city in a variety of situations. I like to keep things super simple and super fluid. Creatively, I wanted to remove all distractions. Logically, I have to do with less practicality. I don’t have the budget to rent or make elaborate sets. I don’t have the resources to install lights all over town. So I decided to go with the natural light approach and stick to a single lens. Only one lens. A great inexpensive 50mm plastic. Armed with nothing but a Nikon D700, 50mm f/1.4, and a ready-made subject group, I went out and created an entire series of photos in a few weeks and in multiple locations. The series has had national exhibitions, won numerous awards and taken me into a whole new phase in my career.
That series was quite a while ago, and I’ve gone through a number of such career transitions in the years since, but the lesson is still there. You can do a lot with a little. And just because you don’t have the money to block an area of the city or shoot with the most expensive equipment, doesn’t mean you can’t create artwork. In fact, by limiting myself to one focal length and limiting my lighting options it’s not ultimately a hindrance, but a major benefit to the production process. Instead of focusing on the technology, I can really focus on connecting with my subjects and seeing what’s in the frame rather than the tools I’m using to frame it. The end result may not be as polished as I could have achieved with an entire manual clutch at my disposal, but the simplicity of the setup has resulted in something far more realistic than what I can achieve.
Of course, this is just an example from my own experience. But the idea of addition through subtraction has a much broader application. Take, for example, the case of film noir. For the non-cinema buffs out there, film noir is a sub-genre of crime films made primarily in the post-World War II years, characterized by a very distinct black and white visual style (often is), morally ambiguous protagonists, chubby girls, and great dialogue. I could write a bunch of articles about what film noir is. And what it isn’t (only black and white doesn’t qualify as film noir). I encourage you to do some research. But, for now, for the purposes of this essay, let’s just say that the look and feel of film noir is very, very cool.
The look and feel of film noir is so distinctive and beautiful that the aesthetic of the genre still influences movies today, some 80 years after it was developed. The surprising thing about that, regarding our discussion today, is that the majority of noirs are made on extremely low budgets. These pots more or less can’t afford the larger budgets for prestigious studio shots. So the filmmakers had to work within tight limits to get what they needed.
But rather than a tighter budget being a disadvantage, they actually add to many of the traits we associate with the genre. John Alton, the master cinematographer behind everything from T-Men arrive Great combination, is famous for throwing these dramatic shafts of light through his shots, creating areas of high-contrast light and deep shadows. This is a look that defines so many genres. But it is largely factual. Without big budgets, they can’t afford to build elaborate sets. With fairly simple sets, you have to use light and shadow to mask certain budget shortfalls and focus your audience’s attention on what you really want them to see. Likewise, the vibe of film noir compared to other films of the time is often the result of having to produce the film without significant resources. All of these can be considered limitations. In the most objective sense, they were. But working within these constraints ultimately produced a pot of gold.
We now live in a world where we can have everything, anywhere, all at once. So now it’s even easier than ever to think that the solution to all our problems is to simply add more weapons to our arsenal. It’s tempting to solve any problem. And, it’s easy to think that if we can’t afford to solve the problems, all hope is lost.
But, if we really take a step back to think about it, we can realize that our limitations can be a blessing. Being forced, or even better choosing, to work within certain limits can often allow us to more easily access the truth and focus on what matters. Focus less on things that are out of your reach. Spend more time focusing on maximizing what you already own. Less can be more. It’s all a matter of how you see it.
