YTU #3 Creative Photograph

Objectives:

1. Learn about the importance of the very common object - “photography” in which creativity plays a vital role.

2. Case studies on three different kinds of creative photography varied from plain people to professional photographers, and find some relations with both creative thinking process and ideas from the text books we have discussed.

3. Explore meanings and insights behind the case studies, and learn a lesson with a comprehensively understanding on how to break out of our creative shell to embrace all the possibilities that are available in daily life.

4. Intrigue people to think creatively on how to they apply this creativity or what they learned into their creative life.


Course content:

1. Importance of photography for creativity

2. Case studies on 3 different creative series of galleries

3. Discussion and Implications from the case studies

A. Importance of photography for creativity

Definition:

Photography is the art, science and practice of creating durable images by recording light or other electromagnetic radiation, either electronically by means of an image sensor or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film.[1]

Photography is undoubtedly one of the most important inventions in history. It has truly transformed how people conceive of the world. Now we can "see" all sorts of things that are actually many miles -- and years -- away from us. Photography lets us capture moments in time and preserve them for years to come. As one will say, photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.

As in today’s modern society, photography has been defined as one of the members in creative industries, which has great influence on our societies harmonious and economy. Essentially put, the creative industries have been seen to become increasingly important to economic well-being, proponents suggesting that "human creativity is the ultimate economic resource,"[2] and that “the industries of the twenty-first century will depend increasingly on the generation of knowledge through creativity and innovation."[3]

Creativity is one of the essential elements to great nature photography. A good photo remains one of the most powerful expressions for creativity. Because of the flexibility on angles and perspectives, people could gain a unique way to see a different world by using creativities on taking photos, which help you to see the world better and to adopt a new point of view on it. This new point of view can thus become a real source of innovation and creativity.


B. Case Studies on creative photography

From a professional perspective 
a) “Cinemagraphs” by Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg

Cinemagraphs was created by visual graphic artist Kevin Burg and photographer Jamie Beck. A Cinemagraph is an image that contains within itself a living moment that allows a glimpse of time to be experienced and preserved endlessly. Marrying original content photography with the desire to communicate more to the viewer birthed the cinemagraph process. Starting in-camera, the artists take a traditional photograph and combine a living moment into the image through the isolated animation of multiple frames. In other words, Cinemagraphs are still images that capture motion within a still frame. As supermodel Coco Rocha said, "it's more than a photo but not quite a video".

Jamie and Kevin named the process "Cinemagraphs" for their cinematic quality while maintaining at its soul the principles of traditional photography (Relation, scratch for ideas from current ideas –“Creativity is more about taking the facts, fictions, and feelings we store away and finding new ways to connect them.”(Tharp)). Their common goal is to find life’s subtleties and use those elements to enhance and make an image come alive. To quote the words from Burg:

“We take the storytelling element of photography and give a little bit more information, which can bring the viewer closer to the subject, or illuminate a particular concept in a new way.”

http://cinemagraphs.com/

Creative process:

“There's movement in everything and by capturing that plus the great things about a still photograph you get to experience what a video has to offer without the time commitment a video requires.”    - Burg

Jamie Beck’s first few animated images were sequenced still shots looped in rapid succession which is a fairly common way of making an animated image. Then she began utilizing more fluid motion isolated in certain parts of an image to capture a moment of time, but also to un-freeze a still photograph by showing that moment's temporal movement (Ideation).

Even though the concept of animated GIFs is as old as the Internet, the ones that commonly appear on the web are often mediocre and even tacky. However, Jamie Beck’s, have an amazing atmosphere instead which has elevated the art of animated GIFs to a more creative and touching step (Wisdom).

Launched virally through social media platforms Twitter and Tumblr, both the style of imagery and terminology has become a class of its own (Wisdom). The creative duo are looking forward to exploring future display technologies for gallery settings as well as pushing this new art form and communication process as the best way to capture a moment in time or create a true living portrait in our digital age while embracing our need to communicate visually and share instantly (Further Ideation, Fruition).


Discussion:
How their creative process relate to the principle of creativity we’ve talked about in class? (Ideation, Relation, Wisdom, Fruition) How about Tharp’s ideas?


From plain people’s perspective

b) “Mila’s Dream” by Adele Enersen

When babies take naps, busy mums generally sigh with relief and either fall on the sofa exhausted or use the time to clean up the mess left behind by the baby when it was awake. But what happens if you’re a creative mum who is on the maternity leave? (Showing the video “Mila’s Dream”from YouTube.)

If you’re like Adele Enersen from Finland, who is a copywriter of an advertising agency as well as a housewife, you might grab your sleeping baby, some clothes and your camera and let your imagination fly. While her daughter is soundly asleep, she create a completely different world form whatever she can find around her!

                                     

Creative Process:

When Mila was born she slept almost 18 hours a day. Most of the pictures that Adele took of her were sleep pictures. Once, Mila fell asleep on the floor in a funny posture, and Adele’s musician husband Lasse Enersen placed a conductor’s baton in her hand which made her look like a little fencer. The couple found it very amusing and next day Adele decided to take the idea further, so while Mila was sleeping Adele took some pillows and blankets and created a little forest on the floor, put Mila in the middle and took a photo. Their friends and family responded to it with glee, so Adele decided to continue making more.

All of the images in Adele Enersen’s dream photography are created around clothing and fabric items like clothes, towels, umbrellas and toys; they include typical dream cliches as well as some abstract visions. In the photos, Mila may be fishing, playing with pets, hanging on a clothes line, riding a horse or an elephant, playing in blossom as a butterfly, flying as a pink superman, or playing some musical instruments. From creating ideas to implementation and editing, each of the photos is finished within a few minutes.

As she described in her blog:

“This blog is my maternity leave hobby. While my baby is taking her nap, I create scene around her and take quick snap photos.

I use only few minutes per picture, including creating idea, implementation and editing, 'cause I don't want to disturb her sleeping and most of my time is for my family. My camera is small and inexpensive Canon IXUS 750.”

Yes, only a small amount of leisure time and an inexpensive normal camera could produce nothing but so talented and amazing creative works! While some people waste their time on wandering their meaningless minds, or investigating how can they shoot great photos from only the professional cameras, this Finland mom instead picked up every trivial thing she could find around herself and created this cute and eyeball-catching photography. So what are you waiting? Just do it!

Discussion:
Talk about what you have learned from this creative mother, you can either make comparison with Jamie and Kevin’s Cinemagraph or relate it to our previous class discussions, or propose your own idea.



c) “Today’s Levitation” by Natumi Hayashi

This is gallery of photographs by and all featuring Natsumi Hayashi, a Tokyo teenager who takes hundreds of pictures of herself jumping until she captures just the right one where, instead of jumping, it looks like she's levitating. Natumi Hayashi‘s blog featured all kinds of normal photos of herself, her pet cat, friends and Tokyo sights, but on September 16, 2010 she posted a photo entitled “Today’s Levitation” and Hayashi has become an Internet sensation that.

                   

As Hayashi said in one of the interviews, it was an English idiom that inspired her to take the first photo of herself levitating - ‘to have one’s feet firmly planted on the ground’. But since she doesn’t consider herself a practical person she chose not to have her feet firmly on the ground in her self-portrait photos, to show how she really is.

“In being free of gravity in the pictures, I am also not bound to societal conventions. I feel as though I am not tied to many things and able to be my true self.”

What makes Hayashi’s photos so popular is her natural expression and pose which has you wondering if she’s actually floating. But the Japanese teen swears she’s no magician, so how does she do it? “The only way to get a right timing for a shot is jumping a lot,” this quote from Hayashi herself dispels our hopeful illusions that she's the first human being who can actually fly. As soon as she finds the perfect spot for her shot, Natsumi sets the self-timer on her Canon EOS 5D Mark II, or asks a friend to press the shutter, and just starts jumping, and continues to do so until she achieves that perfect, natural-looking “levitation.” "Sometimes I need to jump over 100 times to get a right shot."

Learn How to take "Today's Levitation"

(Posted by Hayashi on her blog http://yowayowacamera.com/pineapple1/)

² Equipments and shutter speed

Camera body: Canon EOS 5D Mk2

Lenses: Canon EF50mm F1.2L USM, EF24-70mm F2.8L USM, PENTAX 67 lenses (with adaptors)

Tripods: Gitzo's rapid-pole 3 steps with ball heads (from 1980s)

Shutter speed: 1/500 sec. or faster (1/320 sec. can be used in a darker condition)

² With a self-timer

EOS 5D Mk2 has a 10sec. timer as its longest timer set up. This means that I can get away as far as 10 second distance from the camera after I press the shutter release button.

First, I get a composition and a focus manually.

Then I press the shutter release, run to the right position for a levitation as checking the camera's blinking red LED counts down 10 seconds and jump by my intuition.

In this manner, I need to jump over and over to get the right shot.

² Ask someone to press the shutter release button

When I take my levitation farther away from the camera than 10 second distance, I ask someone (mostly my friend) to press the shutter release button. First, I ask my friend to be a stand-in in a proper position to get a composition and a focus.

Then I go to the position to levitate, and my friend come to the camera (we switch our position) to press a shutter release button in time with my jumps.


C. Discussion and Implications
a) What can you see from these 3 photographs? Are they creative to you? Which one is the most impressive for you, why?

b) How can we learn from their creativities? If you are an expertise of some industry vs. if you are just normal people in daily life?

c) How will you put their creativity into your daily creative life? Habits like photo shooting, painting, dancing, etc. (Further: How to break out of our creative shell to embrace all the possibilities that are available in daily life.)

d) Other implications?



Reference:

[1] Spencer, D A (1973). The Focal Dictionary of Photographic Technologies. Focal Press. p. 454. ISBN 240 50747 9.
[2] Florida, Richard (2002), The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, Basic Books
[3] Landry, Charles; Bianchini, Franco (1995), The Creative City, Demos

YTU#2 - Six Thinking Hats Creativing Thinking Method



Organize and Facilitate the Group Genius

Objectives:

l  Introduce Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats method to continuously develop ideas from Sawyer’s Group Genius book. This task aims to make people know how to use the Six Hats skill into their daily works in order to simplify thinking, to create more creative atmosphere and to improve communication in terms of the teamwork.

l  Train people to use a clearer way of thinking. Make sure people know the benefits, meanings and sequence of Six Thinks Hats, and get a deep understanding on how to build ownership on the objectives and actions. Group members are not just told to do but are creating their own tasks and area of responsibility.

l  By knowing how to develop the objectives and actions for themselves, the group members also to learn to tailor them to their knowledge and interests to execute them more efficiently and can be able to implement this creative thinking skill into future practical teamwork and initiate cross functional collaboration.

Course Content:

•       Biggest enemy in good thinking

•       Why Group Genius?

•       How to facilitate?

•       Parallel Thinking/ Six Thinking Hats

•       Meanings of Hats

•       Sequence of “Hats” creative process

•       Exercises (easy-hard; daily- professional)

•       Key Points

Introduction:

The difference between brilliant and mediocre teams isn’t so much in their collective mental capacity, but in how well they can tap into their collective wisdom and how well they function together.

Why?

To build ownership across the organization. When a group or an organization sets out new goals and directions it is crucial that their members fully understand the scope and consequences of the new goals. The better each group member understands and takes ownership of the new goals, the faster the group can reach them.

How?

Six Thinking Hats (Parallel Thinking Skills) – Created by Edward De Bono

Western model of thinking (adversarial thinking) is not sufficient to tackle all different problems. With the tradition of argument or adversarial thinking, each side takes a different position and then seeks to prove that the other side is wrong. Argument is relied on because we believe that if you remove what is wrong; you will be left with what is right. The reality is that most arguments, and therefore meetings, result in very little constructive output at all, only bruised egos.

Parallel Thinking offers a practical alternative. It encourages co-operation, exploration and innovation. With Parallel Thinking both sides, or all parties, are thinking in parallel, using the same style of thinking simultaneously. There is co-operative and co-ordinated thinking. The style of thinking used can be changed in order to give a balanced, objective view of the situation.

A simple and practical way of parallel thinking is to use the Six Thinking Hats method - this results in dramatically shorter meetings, and more constructive outcomes. The Six Thinking Hats let us focus our thought process and filter out ideas and outputs. It helps you make better decisions by forcing you to move outside your habitual ways of thinking. As such, it helps you understand the full complexity of the decision, and spot issues and opportunities to which you might otherwise be blind. When we think in the normal way, we try to do too much at once. We may be looking at the information, forming ideas, and judging someone else’s ideas all at the same time. The Six Hats method allows us to unbundle thinking. Instead of trying to do everything at once, we separate out the different aspects of thinking. This way we can pay full attention to each aspect in turn.

This method is now rapidly being taken up by corporations such as Du Pont, IBM, NASA Prudential Texas Instruments, NTT, Statoil, Shell and JP Morgan.

Benefits of Six Hat Thinking

l  The hats are visual cues for us to allow an easy switch in our modes of thinking.

l  Simplify thinking. Focus one thing at a time. Reduce the confusion.

l  Reduce confrontation.

l  Expand from one-dimensional to full-colored thinking.

l  Explore subjects in parallel, explore each situation or problem and generate alternatives that go beyond obvious solutions.

l  Increase the constructive output from group work and save time.

l  Create, evaluate and implement action plans.

Meaning s of Six Thinking Hats

1.       The Green Hat- Creativity, Possibilities

²  Green Hat Role

²  Takes us out of usual patterns of thinking

²  Seeks new concepts and alternatives

²  Brings momentum & breaks the rut, remove the faults

²  Think “outside of the box”, don’t have to be logical

Ø  Ask green hat questions

²  Are there other ways to do this?

²  What else could we do here?

²  What are the possibilities?

²  What will overcome our Black Hat concerns?

2.       Yellow Hat – Positive Judgment 

Ø  Yellow Hat Purpose

²  See the good parts of even a bad idea

There’s always a Bright Side

E.g. Bright Side of Global Warming? Bright Side of Marriage?

²  Optimistic that a new idea will work

²  Tend to see the valuable contributions in people’s ideas

²  Usually positive and constructive

3.       The Red Hat- Feelings, Intuition

Ø  Red Thinking Hat Purpose

²  See the emotional perspective to an issue

²  Convenient to switch in and out of the feeling mode

²  Never attempt to justify feelings or provide a logical base and reason

²  Use of intuition and impression

²  Hunches about the best decision

4.       White Hat- Facts & Figures, Information

Ø  White Hat Role

²  Neutral and objective in presenting information - like a computer

²  Distinguish facts. Exclude opinions& judgments

²  Remove feelings and impressions

²  Statistical evidence concerning a decision

Ø  White hat questions

²  What do we know? What do we don’t know?

²  What do we need to know?

5.       The Black Hat : Caution

Ø  Black Hat Role

²  Not argument; objective attempt to identify negative elements

²  Project an idea into the future to see what may fail or go wrong

²  Not to be used for negative feelings which should use Red Hat

²  Quickly see why an idea will not work

²  The “devil’s advocate”

Ø  Black Hat in Meetings

²  Timing of the Black Hat invocation

-          if the devil jumps in at the earliest stage, the idea never has a hope in hell, or ends up having its sharp edges smoothed over

²  Black Hat has to draw a fine line

-          Big difference between someone crushing an idea based on spinning out possible negative scenarios, vs. someone who voices a genuine concern backed with real facts.

²  Black Hat Overdone

-          “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” is probably the fastest way to stop an idea.

6.       The Blue Hat- Manager/Facilitator

Ø  Blue Hat Role

²  Sets the focus, defines the problems, shapes the questions, determines the thinking tasks

²  Responsible for overviews, summaries, & conclusions

²  Handle requests from the group. Monitors thinking, stops argument, enforces discipline

²  Ensures the “rules of the game” are observed

²  Ask for changes in the thinking

²  Focus on the big picture

Ø  Thinking Process

²  Why we are here /what we are thinking about /Definition of the situation or problem /Alternative definitions /what we want to achieve /where we want to end up /The background to the thinking

(Ask which two hats participants feel most comfortable wearing, have them each share their preferred hats and talk about the learning)

Sequence of the thinking and creative process

The thinking hats sequence can be changed depending on what the process or meeting is target towards.

1.       Facilitator (Blue Hat) Open and Clarify the problem

2.       Present the facts of the case (White Hat).

3.       Generate ideas, how the case could be handled (Green Hat).

4.       Evaluate the merits of the ideas; List benefits (Yellow Hat).

5.       List drawbacks (Black Hat).

6.       Gets everybody’s gut feeling about the alternatives (Red Hat).

7.       Summarize (Blue Hat).

Exercise 1: Which style is this...?

ü  Let’s run it up the flagpole – yellow and green

ü  Tread carefully - black

ü  Let’s think out of the box – green

ü  We should get all out ducks in a row – white, black, blue

ü  Let’s pick through the bones of this - white

ü  How do we pull all this together? - blue

ü  Who dares wins - red

Exercise 2: What Would You Do as a Leader?

ü  If the group is becoming jaded & seems to have fallen into a rut? Try a green hat

ü  If the team is discussing a Sensitive/Emotional Issue and team members are not forthright with their emotions? Red Hat

ü  If the team is cozy & in a ‘Yes Boss’ mood? Have a Black Hat session to discuss the pitfalls force the issue by randomly assigning the role of devil’s advocates.

ü  If the team has got carried away by a host of ideas in a meeting! White hat. Make someone responsible for researching and presenting counter-arguments to the best of their ability.

ü  If the team is become defensive & is not open to change? Blue Hat
 

Exercise 3: Fit the hats to the following statement on Business

ü  I think the competitive environment in the UK is getting tougher for Tesco.

ü  So far, Tesco has largely confined its overseas expansion to emerging markets.

ü  Tesco's other mooted US takeover target is Meijer, a privately owned business in Michigan. It's smaller than Albertsons and there's always a danger that small operators could be crunched by the big boys. Meijer would be an unnecessary distraction for Tesco.

ü  To try to take on Wal-Mart on its own home turf would be a foolish endeavor for Tesco, but there are plenty of niche opportunities in US retailing.

ü  I feel Tesco is treating its suppliers very badly.

ü  According to new research conducted by Fitch, today’s consumer expects unprecedented levels of integrity from the companies behind the brands they buy. The consultancy found that 83 percent of British consumers it surveyed believe brands should be more open in their actions; and 41 per cent believe transparency is the best way for a company to demonstrate its honesty.

ü  We have considered all the options suggested before the meeting. Now let’s see if we can think of some further options.

ü  Launching a fair trade brand will generate sales that will replace the loss of revenue we’re suffering due to the decline in the coffee market overall.

Key Points:

ü  Six Thinking Hats is a good technique for looking at the effects of a decision from a number of different points of view.

ü  It allows necessary emotion and skepticism to be brought into what would otherwise be purely rational decisions. It opens up the opportunity for creativity within Decision Making. The technique also helps, for example, persistently pessimistic people to be positive and creative.

ü  Plans developed using this technique will be sounder and more resilient than would otherwise be the case. It may also help you to avoid public relations mistakes, and spot good reasons not to follow a course of action before you have committed to it.

References:



Edward de Bono: Six Thinking Hats



http://www.edwarddebonofoundation.com/sixthinking.htm