Nikio

There are many ways of how to define creativity and its finest results. It probably depends on how you look at it, but I like the idea that each creative output is a product of motivation, skill and taste. Motivation keeps you going, it makes you (wanna) do stuff and it is pretty clear that without the motivation any creativity is nonexistent. Then you must have skills. You must know your devices as well as you possibly can. Despite the obvious talent, it would be impossible for Elton John to compose a song without mastering the piano. Or Michelangelo to sculpt something like David without being really good with stone. This is why every art form calls for constant and fanatic practice.

A lot of people are motivated. They desperately want to do art or science. Some of them learn the skills. But very few have the taste to know in which direction aim their creativity. Taste can be understood as a set of values that guide you trough the process of creation. Even in most trivial of situations you can spot the lack of taste immediately. There are many people who clearly have enough clothes, but they combine them in the wrong way. It is not the lack of clothes that makes them look like clowns, it is the lack of taste. It is the lack of taste to blame that many technically good painters never go beyond what it is sold on the beaches or postcards. It is the same for photography. They are motivated, they have the technical skill, but they don't know what is really good so they aim too low.

So how to acquire a good taste? In my experience this happens with constant criticism. You must put your work under the scrutiny of yourself and others. You might get hurt, but that is a good thing. Bad feelings fade away, the lesson remains. You must also see and judge as many other works as you possibly can (this doesn't necessarily involve informing your peer about the opinion). If you are an architect you should devote at least some part of your every day to review other architects' work. When I was a freshman, a very dear very professor said: "A day without looking at an architectural magazine is a lost day." Today I know how right he was. By looking at magazines you develop a clear taste of what is good and what is not. You later apply that taste to your own work. Without the taste your motivation and skills are simply misguided into wrong directions. And this goes not just for design or arts, it is true for every activity. Because of that many good works of art are very simple and resourceful. You don't need a huge budget to create something original. You don't need many resources. But you need a good taste for it.

Last week I was in Perpignan (France) for the world's largest festival of photojournalism, Visa pour l'image 09. Many world class photographers came (Steve McCurry, Eugene Richards or Stanley Greene to name just a few). And the whole time there was a perpetuating theme; photojournalism is dead.

I can tell you from my experience, that most news papers in Slovenia have ever-smaller budget for photography. Especially for the high-end journalistic photos (which are not to be mistaken for snapshots). They just don't pay! I for one covered Elton John in Croatia entirely pro bono and perhaps for my own amusement and prestige. This happens all the time.

There are many reasons why. I am not experienced enough for a deep analysis, but I can give you a few.

Of course there is financial crisis, but that might just as well be an excuse.

Then there is the availability of the tools; photo cameras. Anyone can buy a decent SLR and that creates an illusion that anyone can make photos... Well, we can all buy a basketball, but can we play like Jordan???
This fact has two major consequences; I greet the first and despise the second.

Firstly we have an abundant creativity of the amateurs. You can see that on Flickr. Millions of photos are uploaded every day. With such a low cost of failure, people experiment more and we found ways of expression that were unimaginable just a decade ago. I watch Flickr and Vimeo very closely, and I continue to be amazed every day. This is great, but it creates a pressure for the professionals not only to become even better and better, but also to grasp the new digital paradigm of creativity. It is difficult for an 50 year old pro (who shot prohibitively expensive Fuji Velvia for most of his life) to start thinking like a 15 year old kid who has nothing to loose. Especially the older generation has many problems now and most of them are paradigmatic. Their skill is not in question, but they have to change the way they think if they want to survive. I believe that is good in the long term. Every revolution has its sacrifices.

But secondly, every journalist (writing journalist) can now have a small camera and press the shutter while not taking notes. And that is profoundly WRONG! These people have NO TRAINING and in general even no talent for visual communication. They are great with words, but they don't know a diddly-squat about visual narrative. As a consequence, newspapers are full of snapshots in the worst possible meaning of that word. In the best case, photos published by some more local daily papers are average, but more often they are terrible.

I get it. Papers have to make cuts. But papers must also realize, that VISUALS SELL (not only photography, but also design)! Editors (again, most of them trained with words) have very high standards and respect for verbal part of the media. They consider it underestimating to publish a crapy text with grammar errors. And that is right, we must have high standards for the written word, but we also must have high standards for the imagery. Pictures can be compelling beyond explanation and together with words they can create a story that is a lot more powerful than words or pictures alone. What bothers me is not just the low quality of visuals, it is the imbalance of those two.

So for now we are in a state of crisis. The old model is still around, the new one is not quite invented yet. How to make it in the future? Will photographers all have to go freelance? I have no idea.

My clients often ask me how much do I charge for a picture. Sometimes they even ask me how much I charge for an hour of work. I can hardly give them an answer to that. Pictures are worthless in physical terms. Once you buy a camera and disk storage it costs exactly nothing to produce a picture. My hour of work might be difficult to calculate because there is a difference if I work in studio or outside in rain where bullets fly around.
But I do know what my quality is. I know how much I invested in my knowledge, AND THAT IS WHAT I CHARGE. "But how many photos will you take at our wedding," they ask. "As much as I have to," i reply. How many hours will I spend in post-production? As many as I have to in order to guarantee a good result!

So the paradigm has to change, some will die, some will rise, but that's life, isn't it?

So it has been a while... again.

When I photograph people, many of them find me annoying. Really. And I can't really blame them; I am not happy with just one or two photos. I must take them at least 50. But there are profound reasons why.

First of all; I wanna make sure that the person looks good on my photograph. In order to achieve that two things must happen; the person must be adopted on my shooting (for that I must be there a while) so that he or more often she is relaxed enough to look natural. And a larger amount of photos must be taken in order to statistically ensure a technically good photograph (in terms of eye blinking, expression, and also focus, sharpness, composition, etc).

But there is a deeper reason and it lies in the way I think about photography. Usually, when I'm in the zone, I'm not even thinking about the object of my shooting. I am literally making the photograph, not taking it. I am thinking in 2D. I am producing a 2-dimensional pattern of our visual communication. At least I try to. The people or objects are just grand means to achieve that. So even if I did 20 photos with you, I might have a new message to deliver or a new emotion to visualize. And that has nothing (or little at best) to do with documenting your physical appearance. For that, one or two photos would surely be enough. But for producing items of visual communication, I could work with a singe model for years... I try to find the next level of portraiture where models are actually actors (very much like in movies) who co-author my story. That story can be also be documentary, but not necessarily. And this is also why I started to systematically study other fields of art like painting, movie-making, sculpting... I am especially interested in works of Asian artists who are supposed to have a bit different way of thinking than us, Europeans. I read and heard a lot about that from many neurological sources, it is a bit too complex to go into it rihgt now, but there are great things there to discover!

I decided to hit the road and go on a tour around high-schools in western Slovenia to promote UMMI summer camps and in doing so speak about issues with creativity and giftedness. My main points are:

- giftedness is a property of mind which has to be carefully nurtured, otherwise skills will diminish to average at best,
- creativity is not a property of mind, it is a way of thinking. It is seeing each thing afresh and approaching problems with playfulness, courage and bravery,
- creative and gifted people are often misunderstood, hence they feel alone,
- but they are not!



I am recording every lecture and I shall publish the best version ASAP. After each lecture I try to encourage debate about this issues to get some feedback. It is a great experience and there is still 5 places to go!

Some time ago I wrote about what resolution in media might be. Only later I remembered a xkcd comic in which the charachter contemplates how wide our options are and how we yet choose to live only a few of "day-types" over and over again. Imagine how it would be like if you could live every day anew, with different tasks and different people.

Something like that is happening to me last 10-14 days and it will go on for an other 5. I have no steady routine, each day is really something special. That is not to say it is spontaneous and improvised, on contrary, my activities are well planed, but still days are very different in comparison to eachother. And they are packed with work work work... From 7AM to 10PM. I could say that right this moment I live a very high-resolution life A lot of data in short amount of time.

One might think this is cool, and it is. But it is also very fatiguing. I learned that repetition is what keeps us fresh for the new stuff (to some extent). It quite hard to live like this for a longer period of time. I can't wait to slip back into a warm old daily routine. At least for a while, to get some mental rest.

So, what was I up to? I can give you a few things, there is lot's more, but I don't want to bore you

One of the things was a new creativity conference, organized by UMMI. It was really really cool. I opened the conference with a Keynote lecture of my own (video will follow), and then I was blown away by lectures of dr. Zadel, dr. Juriševič, Korado Korlevič and many others. This is me during the lecture (photo by Mojca Kukanja Gabrijelčič):


G33Ks might notice a familiar face on my t-shirt Moar photos.

This year I also went on Kras marathon for which I designed the main poster and some postcards. The postcards were designed with photos from Flickr via Creative Commons licence. It is soo cool to have that kind of colaboration across the world. This is a postcart for 4 events that will happen this year. Photos are contributed by Cobalt_sun, ((brian)), Randy Son Of Robert and Samo Onič, who is not on Flickr.

The poster:



That is me with my design. Again - sharp geeky eyes might recognize bent corners on my number tag. This weekend Battlestar Galactica hit its final run and such an important event must be celebrated with every possible detail. I dedicated my 8.4 km run to this series finale.
Moar photos!

So, as mentioned - Battlestar Galactica Series Finale happens only once in a lifetime, therefore it deserves a special party, full of geeks, pizzas (we even ordered one with BSG caption on it), computers and elaborated debates about things that exist only in our imagination(s). But it was great. I'm not giving you any spoilers though...

For the last couple of months I have been involved in a really cool project on Koper primary school. My job is to teach kids various types of media (drawing, photography, movie, digital media...) and finally to produce our own multi-media "thing". At the end we decided to make an animatoin about our trip around Koper (and climbing onto the bell tower of Koper's main church) on a regular chalk board. Yesterday we tried it for the first time and what was done now serves as a trailer for the real movie that we'll do in the next month or two

Enjoy it! It is 720p HDTV!

Have you ever ask yourself what are the aspects that make great performers really great? The question is a lot easier asked than answered, but there are certain things that can be explained and argued. I've noticed one thing that seems to be rather important and once you become aware of it, you can see it everywhere (which is usually the case when you are obsessed with something).

What is the most common thing we do when we acquire new knowledge or a skill? We show off. Children do that all the time and adults are no better. When a new skill is mastered we tend to overuse it in order to create a spectacle that will blow away anyone. Amateur orchestra's like to play out loud for most of the time to show what kind of strength they have, people who learn photoshop start producing over-saturated photos of sunsets which are "so amazing" to them, singers who learned new techniques like to sing loudly for everyone to hear the power of their new voice, and designers who come across some new astonishing fonts, like to put them everywhere they can.

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The thesis of my masters work at Faculty of Architecture was done in the field of architectural acoustics. I spent the last year of formal education going around different concert halls and testing their acoustical propreties. But just before the conclusion of my work I was able to get some very detailed information about our Grand Philharmonic Hall which gave me a deeper insight into this field of science and this concert hall in particular. Since then, I didn't have an oppourtunuty to listen music in that hall, but I did thought about it a lot. So you can imagine I was quite excited when Mr. Simon Perčič from UPOL orchestra called me to photograph their concert which was about to happen there.


click below for more (text and pics)

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Here it is. It was about time, don't you think? Let me know your impressions

PS: this wouldn't be possible without Violetisha from whom I borrowed the css code.