Tweaking photos

I've been thinking too much about how to prepare photos for userpics, 'rogues gallery' framing, or to use in tributes or invitations for milestone birthdays, anniversaries, awards, funerals, etc.  Here's my primer of things to consider.



Choosing a pleasant 'happy snap' of the subject is the beginning, not the end of the process.

By the way, the subject limits the use of her image to this post only.

Some judicious cropping will help keep the focus on the subject.

Head and shoulders is often more flattering than waist up or three quarter. Especially if you are cutting someone out of a larger photo.

A head shot will usually look better than a torso shot. Its about capturing the essence of the person, not every detail.

Less detail makes for a more timeless image - you notice the person, not the unfortunate mid-noughties fashion choices, or the incriminating evidence of where the photo was taken.







You can choose an oval, which keeps the visual focus even tighter.

An oval can create a classic, traditional or retro feel. It depends on the original photo.

There are other frame shapes but oval/circle or rectangle/square are classic for a reason. A star-shaped cut out, for example, can look too-cute very easily.

An 'average' photo - wrong exposure, wrong light, etc. - may look better in black & white. You may want to increase the contrast.

If you're feeling brave, tinker with the mid-tones to get the right amount of detail. You don't want to emphasise every spot or wrinkle, but neither do you want the face to lose definition or character.

Some photos look good in sepia. In this case the subject looks somehow 'happier' in the golden tones, which pick up the sunshine effect. There's more depth too.

Slip sliding away

Another week has got away from me. Time's wingéd chariot is not so much hurrying near as hurrying away. My to-do list has gone critical.

A good habit is a terrible thing to break. A blog, which is unpaid work - however enjoyable - suffers when Real Life ™ intervenes.

During the day, while working on other things, I have many profound and beautiful thoughts I'd like to share with you. Before I can write them down I'm distracted by something (else).  The less I write, the less easy the thoughts are to capture and pin down.

I console myself with the old adage:  don't speak unless you can improve the silence.

And I promise I won't be reduced to telling you what I had for breakfast, merely to have something to post about.

Working from home - two birds with one stone

I'm freelancing from home a lot at the moment. I rather like it. Today I found myself working in 3 different rooms of my house, and out in the garden. The change of scenery is good for creativity, as it keeps things fresh. I find I enjoy my house more, when I use it more.

Wage slaves - and I count salaried professionals in that category - tend to only enjoy their homes briefly. Most of the time, we spend more time maintaining it (it gets dirty when unused too) than enjoying it. For many, the weekend is when we do a week's worth of laundry, a mountain of dishes (especially if we've had a rush of blood to the head and invited people for a meal) and a vacuum, dust and general tidy up.

Working from home, I do a bit of housework every day, rather than a lot at once. So no day is the dreaded 'housework' day. It's great to do something physical while you consider a tricky piece of writing. It's good to get up and more around after you've been text editing at a computer screen for the past two hours.

As for productivity, yes, there are some days when not a lot of 'billable hours' occur. There are other days when I'm still working at 9pm - or when I start at 6am. Over the course of a week, I'm not sure it makes much difference. I don't waste any time on 'make work': at home, you're either working or you're not. There isn't any benefit to sitting around pretending to be busy the way there can be in an office environment.

Working from home is a good way to kill two birds with one stone. Or maybe I'm just learning to appreciate the positives of whatever circumstance I find myself in. It feels a bit like work-life balance to me, if there is such a thing for more than a few days!

Creativity tools

Everyone is, or can be, creative. It appears to be part of the human condition. Many of us would like to become even more creative. Here's a couple of things that have increased my creativity.

• Teach your non-dominant hand to do something new. If you are very dominant with one hand, this will be difficult, time consuming and frustrating. If you perservere, you will find a host of subtle benefits. Breaking my dominant arm forced this on me, which I don't recommend. Daily writing with your 'off' hand will work in a few weeks, if you do some each day. Which hand do you pick up your coffee cup with? Does it feel odd to use the wrong hand?
• Buy yourself some crayons and a sketch pad. Don't expect to produce 'art', but do enjoy exploring drawing or playing around with the colours. Abstract or photorealistic, the point is how it makes you feel, not what the end result looks like.
• Buy a drum, or use a found object such as a tupperware container, a bucket or a pot. Small Pringles (tm) potato chip containers are particularly nice. Explore the different sound effects you can make. Copy the beat of your favourite rock song - then see if you can improvise your own rhythmic line.

In each activity, your brain will forge or reinforce new neural pathways. When it comes to brains, more connectivity means more creativity.

What creativity tools do you use?

The world needs all kinds of minds (Temple Grandin)

Seriously toying with our wild and crazy ideas

Most of us don't pay enough attention to our wild and crazy ideas. We may not wish to enact every one of them, but we should attend to them, note them and keep track of them. We can learn a lot about our deepest longings, and our creativity, from our wild and crazy ideas.

We all have days where we'd like to run away and join the circus, or give up the rat race and have a sea-change or a tree-change. Many of us would like to write a blockbuster novel or have our album go gold or invent a better mousetrap or a really popular iPhone app.

Do you always reject your wild and crazy ideas out of hand? If so, that's a pity because you're wasting a precious resource and that's not 'just being practical' however much it feels like it is.

If you collect your wild and crazy ideas, perhaps in a notebook, you can track the patterns that emerge. Do you always dream of a gap year off when you haven't prepared properly for a presentation at work? Do you dream of a sea-change after you've worked - yet another - 60 hours this week? Do your fantasies of a pared-back Tuscan Villa emerge when you stare at the laundry drying in front of the fire, along with the remains of yesterday's pasta and Sunday supplements orgy?

If an idea is compelling enough, I like to follow through and do some research. Maybe it's not so crazy, maybe it's actually quite possible. I call the phase of research "seriously toying" with the idea. Trying it on for size. I treat the idea 'as if' I were serious, even though I'm not serious - yet.

I suspect that most of us consider 'toying' or 'playing' with an idea the phase where it keeps popping into our heads insistently when we are supposed to be doing something else. And thinking 'wouldn't it be nice if...'. That's daydreaming: it's pleasant but not productive.

Seriously toying with an idea has three possible outcomes:

1. The idea is a pleasant dream, but unworkable.
2. The idea is do-able, and we commit to making it a reality.
3. The idea is do-able, but not now, and we will keep a watching brief and review the possibilities in a set amount of time.

Even if the results of our serious toying lead to the first outcome, we should take away some sense of what was so compelling about the wild and crazy idea. If you dream of a tree change perhaps you should book your next holiday in the country, or look at moving out of an apartment into a house with a small outside area so you can garden, or make a commitment to go to a nearby park once per week and walk under the trees?

We all want what we want, but when we're in the grip of a wild and crazy idea we may not be totally clear on what it is - exactly - that compels us. Even if our needs and wants can't be fulfilled right now, we ought to honour them and acknowledge them, if only to ourselves.

This is post 8 of 365 posts in 365 days.

New skills & old

I'm clever. Lots of people say so, and have done all my life; it would be a mistake to assume they were always paying me a compliment, by the way.

So I've always viewed myself as 'clever' just as I've viewed myself as 'female' and 'brown-haired' - that last being less definitive as I 'mature' - without really thinking too much about what it means. Clever was just a label among a bunch of labels, and it was good or bad depending on who said it. Being brown-haired was the same. Some people like brown hair, but not a single picture book princess except Snow White ever had dark hair, and at the age of seven I worked out that was because of narrative necessity.

I looked it up in the dictionary today. In fact, 'clever' is not so much an attribute, as a skill or a practice: "mentally quick", "original", "bright", "nimble with hands or body".

You know that rush you get when you do something new for the first time? I hope you do. You only get it when you do something difficult, something you're not 100% sure you're going to pull it off... When you do, it feels great. It feels even better if you've tried several times and those attempts haven't worked.

It happened yesterday to me. That's' when I had the 'aha!' moment (also known as a Blinding Flash of the Obvious). I actually felt clever. I put a paypal button into a promotional email. [Did you just lose faith in my cleverness that I found this difficult? Or were you impressed too?]

Later, I showed a colleague how to do a couple of keyboard shortcuts. She was over-impressed, never having used them before or even known they existed. She also worried that she wasn't as quick at them as I was. Ah, perfectionism, that arch-enemy of development...

"Look, you don't think you're clever because you know the way to your kids' schools to pick them up do you?"

"No, of course not."

"That's because its something you've done a thousand times, which is why its easy and you don't have to think about it."

"Yeah..." Where are we going with this?

"Those keyboard shortcuts are like that for me. Someone showed them to me years ago, and I've used them nearly every day of my life since. If I had a dollar for every time I've used them, I'd never need to work again."

What old skill do you take for granted? What new skill could you acquire if you stuck with it through a few attempts?

This is post 3 of 100 Posts in 100 Days.

Reflections & Perceptions

We tell ourselves stories all the time.  Is your story that you're not very creative? Or is your story that you are?

Someone recently told me that I must be "very creative".  I felt flattered, but asked, why? I don't feel especially creative.  I don't get up in the morning and think, "the muse is strong in me today..."  Mostly, I muck about with coloured bits and pieces, and do a bit of knitting or sewing, and play the piano (middling badly).

Turns out, my friend thinks I'm creative because I have crayons, building blocks, a piano and other craft items at my home. I thanked my friend for what was clearly a compliment. But, in a way, she has it almost exactly the wrong way around.

It's not because I'm "a creative person" that I have toys and a piano and craft materials at my home. Rather, I play with toys and music and craft materials because I want to become a creative person.  Our society's view of creativity (and talent, for that matter) is a bit like looking at a photo of someone gazing at their reflection in a mirror, and not being sure which is which.

I'm always intrigued by perception:  it can be both wonderful and disconcerting, or upsetting and disconcerting, to be presented with another person's opinion.  Thank goodness I'm over 40, I find that others' opinions no longer rock my self-perception the way they would have when I was younger.

On another occasion, recently, my husband and I were complimented for our creative courage, in starting our business.  The person who made the comment noted how (comparatively) young we were.  This made us laugh, privately, because at the time it was pretty clear most of our friends and loved ones thought we were nuts. We also recognise that being fairly young and with no dependents, we were in a good position to take a risk. 

Rather than congratulating myself on my entrepreneurial drive, I've spent most of the last decade feeling a wee bit ashamed that I couldn't "hack it" in the corporate world.  Which perception is true?  Possibly both of them, possibly neither.  

20:20 hindsight is certainly a marvellous thing.  It colours what happened.  If we had started our business, and then failed (as so many terrific, talented people do) then I suppose we would now be viewed (and view ourselves) as failed business people.  I doubt most people would praise our courage if that were the case, is it somehow less courageous to fail? Tthe amount of courage required in that moment of choice has not changed - it's safely locked in that past moment and is not available to be changed.  The only thing that has changed is the outcome.

So if you want to be creative, then you must create.  And, at the same time, let go of the need for others' to perceive your efforts as 'art' or 'creativity', and even let go of knowing what the outcome will be. If you continue mucking around for long enough, someone will notice. Most important of all, maybe you'll notice.

The Limits of Possibility

I'm learning a bit about the limits of possibility, just now.  I'm learning that some limits are reached more quickly than I'd like.  I'm learning that some limits are further away than I had imagined.

It's definitely forcing me to be more creative.

I'm focussing my music teaching on short courses and workshops.  As of today, I no longer offer regular, weekly lessons: which is a pretty radical departure for a suburban music teacher.  In finding a way to work that suit my constitution - think educational 'sprinter', rather than 'marathon runner' - I am also finding ways to work that create a niche market for my business.

Some choices don't seem to be very choice.  For a while there, I thought I'd either be giving up my day job completely - which made me miserable - or keep doing it and regularly make myself sick - which made me miserable.  I felt like I'd been smacked up the side of the head by the Limit of the Possible.  So I started wondering:  is it really so black and white?  It's true you can't be a little bit dead or a little bit pregnant, but everything else is up for grabs.

There are some certainties. My bank would like us to pay the mortgage, and since my husband already works hard enough already, there is a magic number I need to earn.  The other certainty is that sooner or later I'll have a bad migraine and need to take a day (or 3) off work.

After that, what if?  What if it were possible to have my cake, and eat it too?  What if I could teach everything I'm passionate about, but only sometimes? What if I had time to pursue other interests and skills? What if I want to stay home some days?  What if sometimes I like to work in the morning, and sometimes the evening?  What if I like to take regular breaks during my work day? What if I want to travel?

Asking the questions, led me to answers.  Some I liked, some I didn't.  So I asked more questions.

One question was, would I like to dip a toe back into my old work life? Is it possible to do a bit of telecommuting? No sooner did I ask this, than I was offered some freelance writing and editing from someone I used to work with.  It's demanding, but interesting, and its intermittent - that suits me just fine.  Even a few weeks earlier, I would have said, "No thanks" when this opportunity came up. I wouldn't have had the time.

I've been asked to run some Workshops overseas, too.  (Oooerr, let me think about that one.)

Six months ago, I had no idea this was where I would be.

I was at a party on the weekend, and someone - inevitably - asked me about work.  I told them roughly what I am up to, and they said, "It must be nice to be so creative and flexible.  It sounds great." 

Wow.  I had that moment where my life, which mostly seems muddled and ordinary to me, seemed enviable and exciting, seen through someone else's eyes.  Which it is:  ordinary and exciting, boring and enviable, muddled and planned.  Pretty much like yours is.

The limits of what's possible are usually a lot further out than our first thoughts tell us they are.  So keep looking, and keep asking questions.

Paying Attention

The gift of attention is a precious gift.  

We all enjoy being with someone who "gets" us, who is easy to talk to because we know they are really listening, who knows all our faults and likes us faulty as we are. Such people seem to see us for who we *really* are.  

Love without attention is like planting a garden and then forgetting to water it.  

We also know the perils of too much of the wrong sort of attention.  There is an attention that sees without joy: that always sees our flaws, our mishaps and the bits that could do with some improving.  It might love us in spite of our faults, but it almost feels like we're loved out of duty, and in spite of our good points too.

Love with too much negative attention is like having a garden, but only seeing the weeds - and even when the garden is weeded and perfect, bewailing the fact that the weeds will just come back!

So how do we develop the right sort of attention?  How do we get better at noticing?

There are two games I like to use.  The first one is a well-known concept of Mindfulness and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.  I just named it and turned it into a game. The second game I came up with all on my lonesome.  

Bear in mind, I'm not clinically trained, I'm just an opinionated childless woman, so use these games at your own risk.

Game One - Notice, Notice, Notice

This game, based on Mindfulness, is about direct experience.  Its allowing ourselves to be open to what is happening, to just notice it and try not to understand, judge or change it.  This takes practice.  

In relation to other people, it is usually more helpful to focus on the person rather than on what you're feeling yourself.  The next time you're with a loved one - a partner, parent, child or friend - spend some time just noticing everything you can about them.  (But don't choose a moment when the other person is trying to tell you something important, or not until you've had lots of practice...)

Use all your senses to Notice, Notice, Notice - what do you see?  what do you hear? what do you smell? what do you feel? and (if appropriate), what do you taste?  

Spend some time going into lots of detail.  If you see that your friend's hair is brown, what colour brown? Is it all one shade? What is its texture? Does it look different from the last time you saw it? Has she had a haircut?

As you focus on the other person, you'll probably get caught up in your own feelings about that person.  Note the feeling that arises in you, but get back to the actual experience of the other person.  So, if you're noticing your baby's soft blond hair, and thinking of how much you love to stroke it, that's fine, but move back to noticing your baby rather than staying with your feelings about your baby.

Game Two - Opinion Origami

The second is to think of opinions (or even judgements) you have about someone, and try to unfold how you came by them, then try to fold them up in a different pattern (hence origami). This works better with positive or neutral opinions than negative ones - negative opinions don't need reinforcing and you probably won't change them.

For example, you might feel that your niece (or brother/sister/nephew/friend) is keen on football.  That may be positive or neutral.  Ask yourself: why do you feel that?  Is it because she often wears team-branded clothing? Is it because she carries football swap cards everywhere?  It is because she talks to you almost exclusively about football when you meet?  

Try to include as much detail as possible.  You might consider how her eyes light up when you bought her a set of football swap cards as a treat.  Or how her voice gets a note of excitement when she is telling you about how she did a deal with a school friend for a rare card last week.

You will end up with a lot of information.  Now your job is to put that information together in a different way, so you end up with an alternative opinion about your niece. (The alternative opinion may or may not be true, that's not important.  It is important that you consider it.)

Maybe your niece is not interested in football, per se, just in football swap cards.  Swap cards may be the latest trend at her school.  The team-branded clothing may be a gift, or perhaps they're hand-me-downs.  Or perhaps she wears them for protective colouration, because they make life at school easier.  Perhaps she wears them to annoy her brother who supports a different team.  Perhaps she talks to you about football because that's what YOU are interested in, and she doesn't know what else to talk to you about.

At the end of Opinion Origami, you may not change your opinion, but isn't your experience of your niece richer?  You've called up memories that are visual, aural and tactile.  The next time you meet her, you're likely to regard her with a kind of wondering curiosity - partly you're testing out your opinions, and partly she is just more interesting now you've spent some quality attention on her!

This game also works well on strangers on public transport, or people at cocktail parties.  In which case I call it the Sherlock Holmes game.

Try one or both of these games this week - and do let me know how it went for you!

Oops.

Well, that was my shortest New Year's Resolution ever!  My apologies to you for missing my first deadline.  (I guess the editors of the TLS and the NYT won't be calling after all.)

The best way to overcome a fear of failure is to "fail early and fail well", so they say.  Having missed my first deadline, I have done that, and now have no reason to miss any others throughout the year.

In retrospect, my birthday was not the most auspicious day for writing an article - even a short one! Between the well-wishers, the partying, and the search for a gift for my twin (whose birthday it was too, naturally) I didn't leave enough time.

What I won't do, is say, "Oh look, you've failed.  You mucked it up.  Why did you even begin to think you could do this?"  I don't know about you, but that's the little voice of criticism that whispers in my ear any time I do something new.  I know it's not just me, because many of my students suffer from this nasty little internal voice too.

Whenever we start something new, we face a barrage (well, a trickle, at least) of nay-sayers. We're too old, too young, too busy, to immature, too flighty, too ambitious, too over-confident, too lazy, or too thick to succeed in our new enterprise.  Sometimes the nay-saying is from our nearest and dearest, and is done out of love and concern.  Our loved-ones don't want to see us hurt.  Most of the negative vibes come from inside ourselves.

It can be very liberating to keep going in spite of this.  Take stock of the risks, decide if it is worth it, then try.  I don't like the phrase, "Failure is not an option".  In most of everyday life, that doesn't come up.  Being willing to fail is the only way to get from here to there.

Beyond failure, when it comes to creative endeavours, we have to be willing to be average... or even 'no good'... at something.  Before good art or craft (music, writing, painting, woodwork, you name it) there is always a stage of bad art.  Sometimes that is the highest stage we'll get to.  For myself, I would rather make 'bad' art with joy than no art at all.

So, as we emerge into 2009, my question is, what would you do if you were willing to fail or be "no good" at it?

Let's all get cracking.

How much time do you need?

"I didn't have time to..."

We say it all the time.  I do myself, so I don't exclude myself from this.  My students say it whenever they haven't done their homework this week.

It's not really true though.  The fact of the matter is, platitude notwithstanding, we each get 24 hours in a day.

So it's not that we don't have time, it's that we choose to spend it on something else.

Some of our choices aren't exactly voluntary - I do realise your boss won't be happy if you "choose" not to go to work tomorrow in order to pursue your musical interests.  Ditto for your school teacher.

Still, how much time do you waste?  

I waste time a lot, but not as much as I used to.  I had a health scare last year, and it forced me to really look at where I put my time.  Along the lines of, "if this is all I have left, is this how I want to spend it???"

I spent a lot of my time being tired.  Tired, and too tired to do anything about it.  So I forced myself to slow down, and do one thing at a time.  More often than I used to, anyway.  I also learned to order take-away.

I spent a lot of time watching TV or DVDs, because I was too tired to amuse myself.  I still enjoy watching movies, but I don't just zombie out in front of the box.

I used that time to teach myself some new music.  I used that time to go for more walks.  I used that time to write, so I really notice what's going on around me.

When I try to "blob out" to relax with TV (or surfing the net ;0) I actually feel more tired, and less relaxed when I'm done.

When I practice my music, I feel less tired,  and more relaxed when I'm done.

So maybe you could choose to spend 5 minutes making some music today.

After all, how much time do you need to be happy?

What I'm loving at the moment...

Grimm's Magnetic Puzzles handcrafted from wood. (Mine is the spiral design.)

I bought mine at Honeybee in Malvern, VIC.

It's curiously soothing to play around with the pieces, which can be put together in a number of different ways. Freude durch Farbe (Happiness through Colour) indeed.

Driven to Distraction?

Here's a link to a lovely article about the creative process - and indirectly about time management.

Article: Driven by Distraction

While I am (obviously) childless, I was moved and inspired by this piece.

A book by the author will be out in September, published by Melbourne University Press.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I've discovered a great website: www.ted.com.

Here is Sir Ken Robinson suggesting that school may kill creativity.



Enjoy!