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Embrace The Remix – Kirby Ferguson


“What’s a remix? In Kirby Ferguson’s view, any piece of art that contains a recognizable reference to another work–a quote from a lyric, a borrowed riff, a filmic homage. Which makes almost everything a remix, from a Led Zeppelin song to a classic film from George Lucas. His deeply researched and insanely fun four-part web series, “Everything Is a Remix,” dives into the question: Is remixing a form of creativity, a production of the new on the shoulders of what precedes it, or is it just copying? He comes out firmly on the side of creativity, calling for protections for people who, with good intentions, weave together bits of existing culture into something fresh and relevant.”
Watch more creativity videos here.

19 Quotes On Beginning

Find out more about this image here.

“Life is not a dress rehearsal. Stop practicing what you’re going to do and just go do it. In one bold stroke you can transform today.” – Marilyn Grey
“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth — not going all the way, and not starting.” – Buddha
“What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” – Seneca
“Every day is a new beginning. Treat it that way. Stay away from what might have been, and look at what can be.” — Marsha Petrie Sue
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.” – Plato
“Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect.” – Alan Cohen
“You don’t need endless time and perfect conditions. Do it now. Do it today. Do it for twenty minutes and watch your heart start beating.” – Barbara Sher
“No good ending can be expected in the absence of the right beginning.” – I Ching
“What’s well begun is half done.” – Horace
“Beginnings are only difficult without any action.” — Byron Pulsifer
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.” – Walt Disney
“You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” — Joe Sabah
“The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings.” — Dave Weinbaum
“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” – Louis L’Amour
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Lao Tzu
“Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” – Martin Luther King
“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” – St. Francis of Assisi
“The secret to living the life of your dreams is to start living the life of your dreams today, in every little way you possibly can.” – Mike Dooley
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
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Encourage Plans To Evolve

Oriens I, Death Valley, California, 1999

I missed the shot(s) the first time. When I got back from Death Valley, a friend said, “Zabriskie Point? Again? Well, I’ll bet you could photograph it in a way that hasn’t been done before.” I knew what she meant, but her comment actually clarified another idea for me.

I had been deeply impressed by the way the light changed mercurially over time, continually transforming the landscape from pre-dawn through early morning. It first lit the blue-gray sky with pale pinks, then turned the far mountains from a cold brown to a hot coral, crept slowly across the valley floor to set Manley Beacon on fire (the crescendo in a magnificent symphony of light that most photographers favor), and continued to create moving pools of light in the foreground during a process that lasts for more than an hour. It is a wonder to behold and to fully appreciate it, one needs to be still and vigilant for some time. Its full impact cannot be found in a single moment. I found it in many.

The solution? Make multiple exposures of the same composition throughout changing passages of light and then blend them together to create the impression of an extended moment in time.
I had made exposures of sunrise at Zabriskie Point, but I hadn’t made the ones I needed now. I had to go back. It took a year and a half. Knowing that so many unexpected things often happen, I prefer to make flexible plans, so I wondered if I would return for an idea that ultimately wouldn’t work. I envisioned glorious light in every layer of the landscape. As I began making the exposures, I realized there was a flaw in my plan. If I selected the ‘best’ light in every area of the picture, all areas would demand equal attention. There would be no contrast. The final image needed shadow just as much as it needed light. I persisted, making exposures, without moving the camera for more than an hour, of every significant change in light – and shadow. My original plan was useful but it needed to be modified as it was executed based on specific conditions, new information, and insight. To succeed, I had to listen not just what was in my head but also to the place and the process.

Later, as I looked at my transparencies, the final solution presented itself. This new solution even highlighted my feelings about the place more strongly than my original idea. The result, different from my initial conception but consistent with my intention, achieves a dramatic lighting effect never before seen at one time. Yet, throughout time, a similar sequence of experiences has been witnessed countless times by so many.

The light on the foreground is unaltered, or to be more accurate, I should say is faithful to the transparencies that recorded it. The separate portions have not been modified substantially, nor were they modified unequally – there has been no dodging and burning. Instead, the light has been reorchestrated with time, faithfully representing the existing light(s) but changing what can be seen in a single moment.

Nothing in the foreground, midground, or background has been added or removed. The sky, however, is an addition from another location. I found the smaller sliver of sky contained in the original exposures made the composition cramped. It lacked the vast sense of space found in the desert. The sky had in fact, been the first indicator of the presence of the coming light, making a thousand transformations before its arrival. But the sky that morning was not particularly noteworthy. I could have spent a lifetime waiting for the perfect sky. I chose instead to incorporate another sky from another location that supported both the composition and the light. This sky I altered dramatically, both in tone and color. I did so to expressively complement the drama of the light below, to support it and not detract from it. While the lower half of the image is a matter of resynchronization, the upper half is a matter of recontextualization.

Neither method (resynchronization or recontextualization) yields a classically objective document. However, the results of their application may yield artifacts that are truer to our experience of events than traditional photographic practices. If applied in specific ways, they can represent certain aspects of events more faithfully, such as the passage of time.

Making this image changed the way I think about and experience the essential elements of photography – light and time.

How many ways can thinking more predictively about change aid your creativity?
How many new ways can you think about the fundamentals of your medium?
How can planning increase your creative success?
What can you do to encourage your plans to evolve?

Read more The Stories Behind The Images here.

5 Resources To Help You Plan Your Successful 2013


At the end/beginning of every year I make plans for the coming year. Doing this consistently has helped me be more personally fulfilled and professionally productive.
Here are five resources that will help you do this too.
1 Make A Bucket List
Identify the actions that are most important to you.
2 Make Plans
Increase your productivity and fulfillment by making a plan.
3 Define A Project
Focus your creative efforts and create an action list to achieve your goals.
4 Developing Personal Projects
Tips on developing, completing, and releasing your personal projects.
 5 Keep Current Projects Visible
Create visual touchstones to help you focus and follow through on projects.
6 Getting Things Done
David Allen wrote the definitive resource on Getting Things Done.
Pay close attention to the section on Mission/Goals/Projects/Actions.
Learn more with my free enews Insights.

How To Build Your Creative Confidence – David Kelley



“Is your school or workplace divided into “creatives” versus practical people? Yet surely, David Kelley suggests, creativity is not the domain of only a chosen few. Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own life, he offers ways to build the confidence to create.
David Kelley’s company IDEO helped create many icons of the digital generation — but what matters even more to him is unlocking the creative potential of people and organizations to innovate routinely.”
Watch more creativity videos here.

Increase Your Awareness Of Your Emotions Through Meditation


For most of us, when it comes to emotions, our thinking is often unclear. Most of us enjoy positive emotions, often looking to things outside rather than inside of us to produce them more frequently and intensely. Most of us dislike negative emotions, denying or repressing them so quickly we make little time to truly understand how they were produced, what we can learn from them, and how to encourage different responses, ones of our own choosing. Because of the volatile nature of emotions, at one time or another and sometimes habitually, many of us repress emotions in an effort to avoid conflict and maintain control. Unsure of where they come from or how they were produced we simply react to our emotions, thinking that they are natural, thus inevitable, or that something outside us produces them, thus we are not responsible for them. Even though our emotions can be highly subjective and individual we think of them as universally justified and even though they often change quickly we think of our habitual reactions to them as unchangeable.

In reality, we’re responsible for our emotions. They’re our reactions. When we find that we tend to react to certain things in predictable ways we may become more interested in learning more about our emotions. When we find that we can choose our reactions we may become more interested in developing our emotions.

Awareness is the first step to developing your emotions. Becoming more conscious of our emotions helps us to understand them better, to be less controlled by them, to choose our responses to them, and even to work with them to reduce, intensify, or even change them. In time, you may even find you respond to other people’s emotions differently.

Simply observe your emotions – and everything that surrounds them.

If you find it challenging to focus on a specific emotion, try bringing to mind an event that evokes it for you.
Don’t judge or attempt to change your emotions – or yourself.
What words would you use to describe an emotion?
Are your emotional reactions linked to specific events in your life or ideas you hold?
Identify the physical sensations in your body that accompany an emotion for you.
Over time, does an emotion stay the same or change in intensity or quality for you?
Do you stay with or return to one emotion more frequently than others?
Do your emotions follow any predictable patterns?
Let your emotions flow, allowing them to persist, change or fade without intervention.

Observe your emotions as if they are only one part of you. While you’re feeling an emotion, it may help to simply state “I am feeling …” which can help increase your awareness of both your active role in their existence and the transitory nature of your emotions.

Find more on Mindfulness here.

My Top 12 Images Of 2012

Illumination VI

Reflection LVIII

Reflection LVII

Illumination VI

Illumination II

Illumination VII

Illumination III

Illumination XVII

Suffusion XV

Suffusion  XIX

Suffusion XXVI

Suffusion XXI

Suffusion XX

This is a selection of my top 12 images of all time. This selection doesn’t reflect sales, publication, or activities on the web. It simply reflects my opinion. Click on the titles to find out more about each image.
Geography
These images are drawn from three locations – Bolivia’s Uyuni salt flats, Namibia’s Sossusvlei dune files, and Iceland’s Skogafoss waterfall.
Process
These images were all drawn from three separate hour-long sessions each yielding complete individual portfolios. I used to think I’d be lucky if I got one really good image from a shoot, but after a few experiences where more than one really good image was made from a single subject, I cast aside my limited thinking. Now I ask, “How far can I take this?”
Concepts
All of these images come out of a way of relating to the world (all of it) as parts of a living thing into whose fibers we are deeply woven. In addition to changing organic forms, they all have a strong suggestion of breath.
Magnificent Moment
They’re all nominees for my list of most sublime landscape experiences. While standing silently focused on Iceland’s Skogafoss waterfall was the fulfillment of many years of looking for my own original response to a classic subject, and walking in the clouds reflected on the surface of Bolivia’s Uyuni salt flats was the realization of a long-standing dream, few landscape experiences compare to the hour spent flying over Sossusvlei Namibia’s 1,500 foot high coral dunes after a sustained sandstorm – the experience was so penetrating it took me quite some time to clearly see the new directions and new levels it offered.It’s challenging to choose so few images from so many – but it’s insightful. Try selecting your own top 12 images. Try selecting the top 12 images of your favorite artist(s).

View more of my Annual Top 12 Selections here.

View more images in my ebooks here.

View my full Works here.

View my Series videos here.

View new images in my newsletter Collectors Alert.

We Can See More With The Camera Eye

Resonance In Blue And Gold I A, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2000

The camera does not see as we see. While it can reproduce the appearance of human vision, it can do so much more. Only two percent of our field of vision is in focus at one moment in time; it can focus one hundred percent of its field of vision. Our angle of vision is less than one hundred eighty degrees; it can be extended up to and even beyond three hundred and sixty degrees in all directions. It can see microscopically and telescopically. It can see in brighter, darker or contrastier light – and even into other portions of the spectrum. It can see in a fraction of a second or over a span of hours, days, months, and even years. With the camera, we have made a marvelous extension of our sense of sight, one that continues to evolve.

I’m fascinated by photographs that reveal more than the eye human eye can perceive. Whenever photographs show me more than I saw, I feel as if a magic trick has been performed. This is one of those photographs. I saw the patterns the rain made in the water but I never saw them like this, until I made the photograph. They were too complex and fast-moving to take in all at once. Because the photograph holds them still, I can spend more time considering them, and my understanding of them grows over time.

While I celebrate the marvelous capabilities of the camera eye, I’m not unmindful of the challenging questions that our use of it raises. At what point do we modify our understanding of our own direct experiences to the documents we create? Which has greater authority? When does a photograph supplant memory? What do we consider to be more factual? What do we consider to be truer?

It’s often said that as you deepen your understanding of something, the number of questions you have about it grows. Over time, I’ve come to love the questions even more than the answers. Sometimes revealing, usually stimulating, always useful, questions can have more than one answer and point the way to many new things.

How many ways can photography help you see and experience more?
How can the ways of seeing you learn through photography be extended to moments when you are not photographing?
Are there ways that photography limits your seeing?
Are there ways that what you have learned from photography limits your seeing?

Read more The Stories Behind The Images here.

28 Quotes On Purpose


“Your work is to discover your work and then, with all your heart, to give yourself to it.” – Buddha
“The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” – Robert Byrne
“If you’re alive, there’s a purpose for your life.” – Rick Warren
“Here is the test to find whether your mission on earth is finished. If you’re alive, it isn’t.” – Richard Bach
“Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.” – Bryant H McGill
“The purpose of a man’s heart are deep waters, but a man of understanding draws them out.” – The Bible (Proverbs 20:5)
“Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life … Therein he cannot be re­placed, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.” – Viktor Frankl
“It is not our purpose to become each other; it is to recognize each other, to learn to see the other and honor him for what he is.” – Hermann Hesse
“Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.” – Clement Stone
“There is one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose, the knowledge of what one wants, and a burning desire to possess it.” – Napoleon Hill
“One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests.” – John Stuart Mill
“Nothing can resist the human will that will stake even its existence on its stated purpose.” – Disraeli, Benjamin
“The secret of success is constancy to purpose.” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Success demands singleness of purpose.” – Vince Lombardi
“More men fail through lack of purpose than lack of talent.” – Billy Sunday
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.” – George Eliot
“The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.” – Michel de Montaigne
“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”  – Seneca
“If you don’t decide what your life is about, it defaults to what you spend your days doing.”  – Robert Brault
“The purpose of our lives is to be happy.” – Dalai Lama
“Life finds its purpose and fulfillment in the expansion of happiness.” – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.” – Helen Keller
“The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.” – Mitch Albom
“No man or woman is an island. To exist just for yourself is meaningless. You can achieve the most satisfaction when you feel related to some greater purpose in life, something greater than yourself.” – Denis Waitley
“This is our purpose: to make as meaningful as possible this life that has been bestowed upon us; to live in such a way that we may be proud of ourselves; to act in such a way that some part of us lives on.” – Oswald Spengler
“It is essential that we enable young people to see themselves as participants in one of the most exciting eras in history, and to have a sense of purpose in relation to it.” – Nelson Rockefeller
“Be the change you want to see in the world.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open one.” – Malcolm Forbes
“The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” – Albert Einstein
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.” – Christopher Hitchens
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people are so full of doubts”: – Bertrand Russell
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.” – Carl Jung
Find more Creativity Quotes here.
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