Against the Slats, originally uploaded by jjvornov.
I just finished reading Seth Godin’s small book “The Dip”. And a very small book it is. His thesis, if you haven’t read the book, is simply that success general follows a pattern of initial results followed by a long “dip” of challenges and fewer rewards that can lead to great results. If you can get through “The Dip”, you graduate into a rarified class of the best where scarcity leads to disproporational returns.
The book helped me see my work career in a perspective that I had never taken before. While I enjoy clinical and scientific work immensely, there have times- years long sometimes- that have been stressful and seemingly without reward. Yet because of them I stand in a somewhat privileged place in my profession, having more that 20 years of research experience in Neuroscience, having worked with outstanding colleagues at outstanding institutions.
Somehow in the last year or two, I’ve taken on the challenge of digital color landscape photography. While I was pleased with images I created two years ago with the Olympus E-1 and excited about images with the D80 a year ago, I now have knowledge and tools at my disposal to create images that I could not have achieved then. The Archive pages in Flickr are a nice way to review progress over time.My “eye” or stye has not changed much, nor has my choice of subject matter. But I now can evaluate the light in a scene and think about how the camera sensor will respond. I’ve now started to think ahead to how I will deal with image problems in post-processing.
I have enough experience with “The Dip” to know that I’m in an exciting early phase where knowledge is not that hard to come by. I only have 295 photos up on Flickr, so every image I process is a significant learning experience. At some point the tools will be familiar enough that they will fade to the background and I’ll be faced with the slower improvement that comes with perfect practice.
However, I do have one strong disagreement with Godin’s approach. For the sake of the thesis, he presupposes that this path of progress is a linear journey with a clear destination from the outset- to be the best in the world. My life experience has taught me that one never knows where the path will lead. Thus it’s most important to focus on one’s immediate choices and continue to grow in skills and experience. I wasn’t planning on working for a global CRO as a therapeutic area leader, but here I am. I built a skill set and it suits this companies needs now.
While the contrasting patterns of slats and shadows were what drew me to capture the image, it’s the purple shadow vs. green wood that interested me as I brought it up though Capture NX and Photoshop. I took this with the Nikon D300 and the 105mm VR Micro. These details are a nice break from the wider landscapes I’ve been capturing with the 12-24mm f/4 DX and the 24mm f/2.8D.
But all I was trying to do was create an image that spoke more elequoently of the surprising beauty to be found in the wood of the porch outside of my kitchen here in suburban Baltimore. Certainly I’ve adopted a strategy of collecting images and improving my skills to generate a portfolio of a dozen or so strong images. I have no idea what my lie beyond that relatively short term goal.