Episodes
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The other day I was on the phone with my friend Neale James and we were talking about a recent episode of his podcast The Photowalk, on which he was talking to our mutual friend Sean Tucker about creativity. āI invite you,ā Neale begins the episode, āto imagine a five-pointed star. Now on each point of the star, Iād like you to think of a word thatās important to you in terms of creativity or your creativity. Each is a kind of cornerstone of the why and even how you create as of today.ā As an aside, if youāre not listening to Nealeās show, you really should give it a try. Neale is a terrific host and his episodes are masterclasses in audio production and atmosphere. Anyway, as we were talking about his episode with Sean, he asked what the points on my creative star might be. On one hand, āwhy do you create?ā is a deceptively simple question that many of us spend inordinate amounts of time wrestling with ā at least I do. I think that Nealeās clever addition āas of todayā gives us a little wiggle room and leaves the possibility open that these five terms donāt have to define our making for all eternity, but rather just for now. Itās one of the reasons that I love this as an exercise. While the creative process itself is important, I think that checking in with ourselves around why we create is equally valuable ā maybe even more so because it allows us to square what weāre making against why weāre making it.
QUESTIONS
What are some of the points on your creative star?
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
LINKS
My archive of paintings
Dorothy Simpson Krause
inkAID
Father Bill Moore
Shepard Fairey
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MUSIC
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If youāve been subscribed for a while, you probably know Iām a big Nine Inch Nails fan and have been since 1990 when I saw them open up for Peter Murphy. The other day, I was watching a terrific video with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross breaking down some of their most iconic tracks. One of the more fascinating aspects of the video was how much Trent talks about process and how important the āfeelā of the music was and still is. āWhen we write music,ā Trent says, āitās coming from a place where its main intent is to have you feel a certain way. Itās not coming from a love of melody and a joy of intricate chord progressions or technical wizardry.ā
I love this because heās not just chasing easy likes or trying to impress the audience. Instead heās focusing on how the work serves the overall project and on the relationship between the work and the audience. Itās not a ālook at meā type of thing, like a gratuitous guitar solo or a vocalist who takes every opportunity to sing an unnecessary run. Thatās not the point, which I think speaks to a level of creative maturity thatās important to cultivate as any kind of artist.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Missing episodes?
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Last week, we recorded the last episode of On Taking Pictures. If youāre a longtime listener, you may think youāve heard this before, and youāre right, you have. But this time itās different. Iāll get to why in a minute, but first I need to back up.
In 2008, I was teaching Photoshop at Tri-Community Photo in Covina, California. One of the other instructors and I started doing photo walks with some of the students on the weekends. As they got more popular, we put up a simple web page called Faded & Blurred that had details about the upcoming walks. It pretty quickly evolved into a full-blown site, complete with a blog, spotlights on some of our favorite photographers, and a podcast called Q&A@F&B, which was a series of long-form conversations with photographers who were willing to sit down with me for an hour and talk about their work. In addition to getting to talk with photographers like John Keatley, David duChemin, and Ibarionex Perello, I also spoke with Bill Wadman for the first time. Bill and I hit it off straight away, and in 2012, when he was thinking about doing a weekly photography podcast, he started auditioning potential co-hosts. He reached out to me and asked if Iād be interested. I said sure, and my audition ended up being the first episode of OTP. For the next 6 years and 325 episodes, my Tuesday mornings were spent recording the show, with me in Rancho Cucamonga, Californiaāat least to startāand Bill in Brooklyn, New York.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Email: [email protected]
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The artist Richard Serra died recently, and I know heās considered a big deal in the art world, but honestly Iāve never really gotten what all the hype is about. I suppose I can appreciate the scale and the forms of some of the work in the same way that I can appreciate the architecture of Frank Gehry, but overall, it just never really grabbed me. Anyway, one of the posts that came up in my feed contained a quote by him that goes:
āArt for the most part, is about concentration, solitude and determination. It's really not about other people's needs and assumptions. I'm not interested in the notion that art serves something. Art is useless, not useful.ā
LINKS
Conversation with an Artist: Richard Serra
Richard Serra - Talk with Charlie Rose (2001)
Richard Serra on his Drawing (2011)If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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After recording last weekās episode of On Taking Pictures, Bill sent me a link to a video thatās both fascinating and deeply disturbing, called āAI vs Artists: The Biggest Art Heist in History.ā The video presents some of the grim facts around how images, including the 5.85 billion uncurated images in the LAION-5B dataset, are being illegally scraped and used to generate derivative work. The dataset was initially intended for research but has since been made available commercially and has been used to train AI models, including MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. While it does contain images from the public domain, it also contains millions of copyrighted images, as well as explicit content. As they say in the video, no consent was obtained, nor were artists given the opportunity to opt in or opt outāand this is really at the core of why so many artists whose work has been stolen are so upset.
LINKS
Juxtapoz article
Wolfe von Lenkiewicz
AI algorithms
Discussion on Threads
Gagosian
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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About a week ago, I jumped back into using Photoshop for the first time since 2018 and Iāve got to tell you, it was kind of like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Yes, the interface has changed a little and a bunch of terrific new tools have been addedāespecially Object Select, which Iāll come back to in a minute. But even after such a long hiatus, it was still so familiar that straight away it got me thinking about why I stopped using it, and in a broader sense, about some of the decisions we make around the tools we use.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com
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I started this Iteration on February 29thāLeap Dayāand for me it was a good day, which, frankly, I really needed. In the last Iteration, I talked about how difficult 2023 was for me and in the week or so since I shared it a lot has happened. Probably the biggest thing is that Iāve started going to therapy. Iāve danced around it for a long time and I think it just got to a point where I could no longer keep pretending that everything was okayāthat I was okayā and that whatever was āwrongā with me, I could either fix it or just keep pushing it down. Neither of which is true, of course.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Iām not going to bury the ledeā2023 was not a great year for me, especially financially. In fact, I think it was one of the worst years Iāve had since I became a solo creative, and for the most part, it was nobodyās fault but mine. One of my favorite movies is High Fidelity (get the book here) and in it, thereās a scene where Rob (played by John Cusack) is going through a particularly frustrating time and says, āIām sick of the sight of this place. Some days I'm afraid I'll go berserk, throw the "Country A through K" rack out on the street and go work at a Virgin Megastore and never come back.ā I can definitely relate to that and itās kind of where I was at the end of 2022. But I thought I would give it one more year to see whether I could come up with some new ideas and new work and maybe figure out a way to navigate the changing landscape of trying to eke out at least a partial living by being creative. And I know that phrase ābeing creativeā is pretty loaded and it means different things to different people. For me, by and large it means painting, writing, and podcasting, or some combination of the three. Photography is in there somewhere too, but Iām still not really sure where.
If you enjoyed this Iteration, I would love it if you would share it with a friend or two. And if it resonated with you on some level, Iād love to know why. Email me at [email protected].
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Website: https://jefferysaddoris.com
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Email: [email protected]
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Today is February 5th and it would have been my dadās 83rd birthday. I normally mark the day by posting a simple message like āI miss you, Dadā on Instagram or Twitter, when Twitter was still a thing and I was still on it. Today, I want to do something a little different and tell you a story. My dad could be tough and for a big part of my adolescent life, we butted heads. A lot. At one point, it got pretty bad and we actually didnāt talk for a while. It seemed like we were often at odds with one another about something, but maybe thatās just how I need to remember it. When he got sick, we got another chance to get good and let all of the things that once seemed so important just melt away. As heartbreaking as it was to see him deteriorate like he did, I really am grateful for the time that it allowed us to spend together. We managed to get to a place where we respected each other, not just as men, but as father and son. We spent a lot of time on the front porchāoften in silence. We watched a lot of westerns and we talked about some of the things that went unspoken for decades. It wasnāt perfect, but it was good. I was holding his hand when he died in 2013 and while I was extraordinarily sad, when he took his last breath I was also grateful. He had fought as hard as he could for as long as he could, but now his pain was over and he could finally rest.
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A couple weeks ago, I finally bought a set of wireless mics. I had been wanting and maybe even needing a set for a long time as a way to record the random conversations I seem to have with people out in the world on any given day. Iād been looking at them for a while, but I saw a review that Curtis Judd didāwho was one of my favorite audio YouTubersāand I thought, āI'm just gonna get these. They'll be fine.ā I had been going back-and-forth between the RĆøde Wireless Go IIs and the DJI Mics and then saw these Hollylands and thought, āYou know what? I'm just gonna get them. The reviews are great (but specifically because I trusted Curtis).ā So I bought them and they were just packaged so well and the design of the packaging was so well thought outāand borderline meticulousāthat I decided I needed to do a video about it and talk about why those kinds of details are importantāat least important to me.
LINKS
My video āunboxingā of the Hollyland Lark Max mics
Hollyland Lark Max - 2-Person Wireless Microphone
Curtis Judd - Hollyland Lark Max Review
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If youāve spent any time around me at all, you know that I have opinionsālots of themāand I have since I was a kid. Sometimes when I would offer my unsolicited thoughts on various things, my mom would respond with āOh, there he isā¦my little critic.ā The thing is itās not just criticism. Not always, anyway. More often than I generally care to admit, I find myself feeling personally offended, either by the design or functionality of a product or service or by someoneāwhether I know them or notāwho simply doesnāt do something the way I think that it should be done. And to be clear, itās not that I think that Iām better as much as I think that the way I do certain things is. Iām not right all the time and I have no problem admitting that. But when I am and I think that youāre not, Iāll happily tell you. I think itās something I inherited from my dadāor maybe itās a trait of undiagnosed neurodivergence. Either way, while I think Iāve gotten better about not being so critical (at least publicly), letting go of the behavior can be a mixed bag.
LINKS
Sean Tucker
The Meaning in the Making
The Man in the Arena
Simon Sinek
Start with Why
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Well here we are again, nearing the end of one more trip around the sun and I for one cannot wait for it to be over. Christmas used to be my favorite time of year, but that was really because of my mom. She would start decorating the house around Thanksgiving, and when I say decorating, I donāt just mean putting up lightsāour house looked and smelled like a Hallmark store. Yes, there were lights, but she also had all sorts of ornaments, figurines, and little holiday town squares and villages. She wrapped or swagged garland everywhere she could, displayed her favorite Christmas cards from years past, and sometimes you could barely see the actual Christmas tree because it was absolutely covered with lights, decorations, and tinsel. Lots of tinsel.
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Back in the late 70s, there was a terrific documentary on the BBC called Connections. It was hosted by historian and author James Burke and now that I think about it, I donāt remember whether I watched it on PBS or I borrowed VHS copies of it from my freshman English teacher, Mrs. Copeland who also loaned out copies of Cosmos. And to be clear, Iām talking about the Carl Sagan version, not the Neil Degrasse Tyson version. Regardless, the show was all about tracing the connections between things that on the surface share nothing in common. I found it fascinating and I think it inspired me to start looking deeper at the world around me to try to see how things might be related.
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As we get into this Iteration, Iād like to take a minute to let you know about some changes that Iām working on that will be rolling out in the coming weeks and months. Iterations will still be weekly (mostly), but Iām going to mix up the types of posts Iāll be including and treat it more like an old-school blog. For example, you may have noticed that the Blips have been getting more substantial in terms of the research I do and the number of links I include. They started out as a just few links to things that I saw or found interesting during the previous week and have been evolving into something more comprehensive and hopefully more interesting and inspiring for you. Moving forward, theyāll still be part of their own section on Substack, but Iām going to lose the word āBlipā and the number in the naming convention of the titles to alleviate any potential confusion that comes with having Blip number 47 alongside Iteration number 124. Iām also going to be adding reviews into the mixāand that could mean books, movies, music, or the tools I use (like cameras or my favorite pencils)āso file numbering will be even more unnecessary. As you might expect, theyāll also typically include some sort of backstory and lots of links for you to explore. The more āexistentialā essays (like last weekās Learn to Love the Process) will continue, but wonāt be quite as frequent.
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Over the past few days, the photography world has been buzzing about the āglobal shutterā on Sonyās new flagship A9 III. Iāve listened to various YouTubers andinfluencers talk about it as if itās the second coming. Theyāre saying āitās the most remarkable camera Iāve ever usedā and calling it a āa game changer,ā insisting that āit will change photography forever.ā But hereās the thing: for 99% of photographers, it wonāt change anything. If this is all Greek to you, let me back up a minute and briefly explain what a global shutter isāand I promise that this Iteration is not just about photography.
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They say that one of the best ways to solve a problemāat least a creative oneāis actually not to think abut it. After all, how many times have you been doing something like taking a shower or going for a long walk and you find yourself having one of those eureka moments where suddenly the solution to a problem youāve been wrestling with forever seems so clear? It happens to me a lot and itās one of the reasons that taking walks in the forest behind our house has become a daily ritual. Trying to be present in something other than active problem solving allows our brains to continue working in the background without us trying to consciously force a solution. The act of stepping away from a problem is called the āincubation periodā and itās been studied for decades. In his book The Art of Thought, Graham Wallas proposed that the creative process is made up of four stages: Preparation (the acquisition of knowledge to some task), Incubation (the background process that occurs when conscious attention is diverted away from the task), Illumination (the moment the creative idea flashes into sight or being), and Verification (when the creative idea is subjected to evaluation)." While there have been dozens of studies documenting and validating the importance and effectiveness of the incubation period, last week I experienced another example of it firsthand.
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As I was working through the recent redesign of my websiteāwhich you can read about or listen to in the last IterationāI started to look at some of the other software I was using to see whether what I was using still made sense for the projects Iāll be doing in the coming year. I think itās sometimes easy to get into a routine of using tools that are āgood enoughā that we just donāt look for potentially better options. I know thatās been true for me.
About eight years ago, I ditched Photoshop completely and started using the Affinity suite of Photo, Designer, and Publisher, which by and large have been great. There are a few features I miss, but nothing thatās really kept me from doing the work that I needed to do.
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Last week I did a soft-launch of my newly redesigned website, which in an of itself isnāt all that unique since Iāve resigned my website dozens of times over the years. What is uniqueāor at least differentāis the overall focus of the site and the process I went through putting it together this time around. I started by asking myself a relatively simple question: do I even need a website? The most common answer is āYes, of course,ā which is often followed by āespecially because youāre an artist.ā But I actually know quite a few ācreativesā who donāt have their own websites. Some rely on a strong social media presence, some have gallery representation that drives sales of originals or prints, and others just have a storefront, so that a dedicated personal site isnāt really necessary.
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Next month is the tenth anniversary of my dadās death, so naturally Iāve been thinking about him a lot. Last year, I completely forgot about it, which I tried to tell myself was actually healthy, but I just ended up feeling guilty about forgetting. If youāve been following me for a while, or youāre an OTP listener, you know that my relationship with my dad was often difficult, to say the least. But as Iāve been thinking about him lately and how Iāve talked about our relationship in the past, I feel like maybe Iāve been a little incomplete in how Iāve portrayed him. I loved my dad, no matter how close or how far we were in the moment, and the truth is that heās just as responsible for my creativity and to an extent my curiosity as my mom and my stepmother were.
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Lately, Iāve been thinking a lot about inertia and motion and how it applies to my creative practice. We know that Newtonās First Law of Motion says that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless some sort of external force acts against it. Conversely, an object at rest will tend to stay at rest. But I would argue that the Fist Law also applies to intangibles like thoughts and ideas. For example, this week has flown by. Actually, the past couple of weeks have and I think itās because Iāve been working through so many ideas and potential projectsāand Iāve been working on them differently than I have in the past, which I think is whatās making all the difference. And to be clear, when I say āworking,ā sometimes that means just letting an idea go until it needs to be addressed. For some things that means now, but for others, that may mean next year.
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