On Deciding . . . Better 3.0

That blank sheet of paper in front of me is pretty confrontational. It challenges me to decide what to do with it. The camera challenges me to pick it up and point it at something.

True, once I’m looking through the viewfinder, I go into some sort of  “Photographer” mode. My personal identity simplifies down to a guy looking through a little square. All of the circuitry that thinks about lens choice, aperture, light angle, shadow depth all spring into action unbidden.

I even hear Vincent Versace’s voice in my ear murmuring “Own the frame . . . own the frame”.

I capture, move, capture, adjust, scroll through images on the camera’s screen, adjust, capture, move.

There’s a flow where my vision, the set of tools and my environment all meld into a seamless extension of me.

Of course writing this post wasn’t all that different. I came to the text editor with the germ of an idea and soon found myself in a flood of ideas, unaware of the keyboard, word choice or what computer OS I was using. Me integrated into a set of tools interacting with an environment. Here the environment isn’t real at all. Just ASCII strings.

Engaging in all of the complexity of a blank sheet of paper or the unstructured visual environment puts the me that sits in my head “out there”. Words and cameras have that power.

The Internet has the opposite power. Sure I’m in a flow out there when browsing, but it’s a flow that’s not much use that emerges. It’s often a seamless flow, but its not controlled by a creative process, but by a consumptive process. Looking for a stimulus “out there” that will satisfy. A new email, maybe with good news. A post or tweet I agree with, that validates my point of view. News of a long awaited OS update- maybe just rumor of a new piece of gear. Not yet? Cycle out to something else and come back again later. Later? 5 minutes then 10 minutes.

Who’s the actor here? Who’s choosing?

Time for lunch. Where does the day go?

The Golden Hour, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I captured this last night to experiment with the warm and cool light idea. This is the view looking across the street from my house. The sun was down, but the D7000’s ability to capture crisply at ISO 800 plus the 35mm f/1.8 DX prime made this possible.

Perspective Always Helps, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I finally did a first scan through all of the Yellowstone trip photos. Feels good to have an image backlog.

Silo, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Looking at classic color landscape (Galen Rowell, others) there is often a beautiful interplay of warm and cool. Often its the warmth of low angle sun on rock playing against the dark sky. I tend to make the mistake of waiting for warmth in the sky instead of using its coolness as a foil.

Reducing complexity is a real cultural concern in recent years. Its often cast as a positive goal: increasing simplicity- but I think that a diminutive can’t be increased. Complexity is our true target.

Similarly, that diminutive, “focus”, has become the goal achieved through “more simplicity”. From my decision analytic perspective, the problem is one of complexity leading to more difficult decisions. Why is complexity harder? Because complexity increases uncertainty. If there are two alternatives, the decision space is smaller than when there are one hundred. We use metaphor and models to reduce complexity and make decisions easier. This is the paradox of choice. More alternatives make decisions harder not easier.

Ctein:

In a shorter span of time I probably made four times many photographs, most of which will prove redundant, and editing down that set is going to take uninspiring hours of peering and comparing.

Is the answer really to reduce our decision space in reality? Is it really better to have fewer clothes or fewer browser bookmarks? Or to return home after an afternoon of image capture and realize that the potentially great image is marred by being just slightly out of focus? Wouldn’t have been better to just grab the same image 3 times, knowing that they might be identical, but that it also could be that one and one only really was successful?

I challenge the advocates of “less is more” to convince me that they doing any more than reducing the number of alternatives they have available and thus simply artificially making decisions easier.

I believe it is possible to do better by living in a rich, complex, uncertain environment full of way too many choices and lear to decide better. A world filled with only chocolate and vanilla? Ugh. Give me chocolate raspberry. Gelato, sorbet or artisan ice cream. My choice.

I started out writing about how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty. At some point, I became more interested in the meaning and sources of uncertainty than the decision theory itself.

First, I explored the background concepts of probability and the unpredictability that arises from non-linear or discontinous processes, the provence of chaos theory. The problem is that while the world is not predictable as one might expect from a clockwork universe, its also not without regularity. These patterns are what we use to make best guesses when the future is uncertain, complexity.

But what’s most interesting are emergent phenomenon, those things that arise out of their components with no real clue to the nature of the whole in the analysis of the parts. My lifelong area of study, the brain, is perhaps the greatest example of emergence- what we call mind or consciousness. How does it arise? Where does it come from?

In the end we come full circle because we can’t understand or predict these emergent phenomenon. So we rely on simplification and metaphor to make sense of the complex and mysterious. Clearly one of the functions of our mental models and computational tools is purely simplification, a creation of a simpler, more predictable universe to deal with.

Sedum Closely Observed, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

My photographs are not carefully considered. My eye is attracted to some form or light. I frame and capture. Work the subject until I’ve made what I think will be a usable image.

One of the interesting consequences of moving personal identity out beyond the confines of the brain and body is that our feelings about external objects and people becomes enmeshed with the sense of self.

When I’ve had my car broken into or, worse, had a robbery in my home, I always had a feeling of personal violation. When some one I love is feeling bad, I feel bad. When they are away or, in the case of my parents, have passed away I feel as if I lost a part of myself.

And under an assumption of extended cognition, I really have lost a part of myself because those people or things are a part of me- or at least a part of the mental model of me.

This makes creating art hard. The photograph I posted just now is a part of me. I decided to capture the image, conceptualized a look for the final image and used my skills of image manipulation to try and realize that vision. Now that its out there it is not separate from me. It actually represents me in the world. Criticize it and I will feel attacked.

Pattern Interrupted, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Nikon introduced a 35mm f/1.8 prime for their cropped DX cameras. I had used my old 50mm f/1.8 when I started with the D80, but moved to the 24 mm f/2.8 as the compact, light kit. Somehow when I moved up to the bigger, heavier D300 it made more sense to put the bigger Tamron 17-55mm zoom, giving me a fuller range.

But now with the smaller D7000, a small, light prime makes sense again so I’ve added the 35mm f/1.8 DX to my kit. So far I find it sharp enough but the out of focus areas can be harsh looking. In this image I used the narrower DOF but in the end added more blur with Photoshop to get the background softer and more surpressed.