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Just Like Playing The Trombone
Some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head recently:
I spend a large portion of time doing what I gather is called "creative professional" work. I guess you could also could call me a "knowledge worker," but I like the sound of the word creative better. I tend to think of myself as an artist who knows some math. Maybe a better word -- or a less pretentious one -- is craftsman, but I don't like the implication that art is something that you only do in rarefied circles.
Most of my day is spent thinking about, discussing, or writing code. Sometimes it surprises me the extent to which thinking and discussing outweigh the actual writing, but my experience has been that (unless in some kind of crisis mode) I work better when I let things simmer. Something I've heard novelists say again and again when discussing their writing process is that the part of the day spent laying words to paper is a small percentage of their actual day. And when they talk about where their ideas come from, they talk about it welling up from some unseen place; about an alchemy that occurs when they bang around the thoughts in the back of their head with the unexpected serendipity of ideas from out in the world.
I've become more and more convinced that the act of writing code -- for me, at least -- is like the act of writing a novel. Granted, this can mean different things to different people: creating a prodigious outline that you fill in; getting to know the characters and then seeing where they take you; plowing through from point A to point B and then surveying your path and course-correcting in retrospect. But no matter the approach, both acts are about creating a meaningful and self-consistent web of ideas that communicate something to other observers. This happens at multiple levels: does your code compile? Does your dialogue make sense? Is your symbol system coherent? Or: is the application meaningful and useable to others? Does your story resonate?
For me, writing code is a weird synthesis of composition and archeology. I'm creating something out of whole cloth; there's no doubt about that. But that something is influenced by the conversations I've had with others; the requests and the brainstorms. It's influenced by what I think is the "right way" to do something, both in communicating something to the reader/user, and in how I devise the underlying architecture to make things easier on myself and other developers. I know where I'm going, but I'm also discovering where I'm going as I write. Sometimes I feel like the captain of the ship; but a lot of the time, it's more like I'm discovering something that was there all along. Certain decisions just feel "right." Like the old joke about sculpting, it's easy: you just chip away the parts that don't belong.
I find writing code extremely rewarding, but also extremely taxing. This kind of creative act -- this composing of something that didn't exist before -- requires me to hold all, or at least parts, of an idea structure in my head. There's no physical artifact to look at; like writing, the undercurrents stretch throughout the text, and aren't easily contained in one place. It strikes me that it must also be a little like composing music; you create a text, but that text is inert until it's played on an instrument. You have to be able to hold in your head an imaginary orchestra that you can use as a touchstone in between the times you muster up the full orchestra and give that composition a spin.
I've been realizing lately that it's for this very reason that it's not surprising that photography has become such a satisfying hobby for me. If writing code is like composing music, taking pictures is like playing an instrument. At least for me.
This analogy works in two ways for me. First, a camera, like a musical instrument, requires practice. When I played the euphonium (and the trombone) back in school, I spent a lot of time running through scales, developing my lungs, and playing pieces over and over again. There were certain common acts, like "translate the ink blot on the page into this combination of finger positions and mouth shape" that I needed to be able to do fast and without thinking (too much). And I needed to get used to pieces so that reading the music became a fallback, and that there were no surprises in recital.
Similarly, the camera has certain motifs that require practice. I still fumble with the zoom and the focus knobs on my lens. I still forget to check what ISO my "film" is set to. I need to be able to see something with my eyes and be able to translate that into a frame in the viewfinder, and to be know which lens I'm likely to need, or how I might need to modify the settings on the camera. I need to be able to find something in the viewfinder quickly; especially if it's a dynamic situation. With practice, I can develop my instinct for where I start from, so that my odds of getting a good shot -- especially of something happening in the moment -- increase.
The second way that this analogy resonates for me is in how I find myself approaching photography. I'm not particularly interested in arranged shots, or studio shots. I don't want to arrange lights, or people, or props to create a visual effect. I'm not bagging on this -- I enjoy a lot of work done by others that's done in exactly this way. But I'm not that interested in doing it myself.
My motivation for taking a picture usually is my desire to show someone else what I've seen. That sounds simplistic; I suppose ultimately it is. But what I've found is that there's often a big difference between what I see, and what I see when I look at the picture. The eye/brain combination is good at picking out details from an immersive landscape, but the kinds of details you tend to pick out change when you limit that landscape. The act of framing the shot -- putting a border around it -- changes what we think is important in the picture. So for me, it becomes about finding the way to take that picture so that you see what I saw, when whatever it is was that caught my eye... caught my eye.
The part that's becoming clearer to me is that there's a strong emotional component to this message. When I see something as part of my world -- as part of my life -- it has meaning to me that's informed by all the stuff that's rattling around in my head and rattling around in my environment. And to take the shot is to chop that image off from that environment; to cauterize it, and seal it up, and pass it along. It's almost inescapably a violent act to commit on an idea, and the trick is to figure out how to do that while inflicting as little trauma to that idea as possible. I'd like to give you a bouquet of flowers, and I'd like to retain as much beauty and power as possible even when transplanted outside of its soil.
So, like playing an instrument (you thought I forgot!), taking a picture -- for me -- is like coming across a score of music. It requires me to play it carefully and well for it to bloom into its full expressive and emotional content. It requires a careful of a transplant as possible to live outside of its native environment.
And because it's about interpretation, it's a wonderful respite from the must more rawly creative act of writing code. I'm not spinning fantasies from nothing -- I'm wandering out in the world and getting out of my head, and trying to operate on perception and instinct. It doesn't have to be coherent; it just has to be interesting.
In practice, this is demonstrated by how I don't spend a lot of time manipulating my pictures other than cropping and adjust contrast or color levels. The Jabberwock manipulation below was an outlier, but still ties in: there was an idea I wanted to express, and the raw picture wasn't really showing what my eye was seeing as I drove past this strange dragon stump every day. So I messed with it. I'm not interested in journalism, or even objectivity. What I see is by definition subjective. I want to somehow transplant that subjective idea out of my head without it wilting too much in the process.
Obviously, this dichotomy is imperfect. Coding is also like playing an instrument, but my approach to coding isn't as reactive as my approach to photography. And for photographers who are more interested in staging scenes; working with lighting; telling a bigger story; maybe even making a movie -- I have no doubt that they regard visual composition as tiring (and as rewarding) of an act as I find writing code. But I like that I seem to have found a good balance between these two passions -- one that puts in me on both sides of the podium.
(Yes, yes, I know I started with music, got into writing, got back into music, and somehow ended up in gardening. But I don't think you guys would have found this as interesting of a read in Objective-C, so you'll have to bear with my limitations in other expressive arenas :) 5:17:15 PM () 
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