Nothing wasted.
I have a few questions for my creative friends out here.
1) Have you ever felt you were tired of justifying your storage of photos, words or songs that never quite turned out as you had first expected?
2) Have you ever felt adamant about not dumping out a part-song or song you’d part written? A photo that wasn’t in focus? Or missed the ‘actual’ subject?
3) Have you ever experienced the joy and delight when you make good of what seemed flawed after adding perhaps filters, or re-cropping, or just further blurring, or vignette to it?
4) Have you ever felt a connection or a relationship with the moment of writing, of painting, dancing or snapping that felt like a fine flop that was personally worth keeping, and even precious to you?
First Shot of a Magpie Nest
Here’s a photo I’d taken that i’d taken. (You can see the same in my original music @ my youtube.com/julietpang music channel – they are all part of me, and I got better with time if i could see myself honestly at each stage) The first shot and the subsequent. I always found first instincts to be most accurate to the moment, and hence most honest, and strange, unexpectedly most beautiful to me. And because I see the beauty in it, I would like to communicate that to the world, using my little tools, my little ways. Sometimes it involves removing its focus, or topic, or theme even further, other times, it involves reframing, and sometimes, simply not doing anything to it. But no moment is ever wasted, unless you didn’t enjoy it. My first shot often turns out to be my preferred shot, and the 2nd often just a display of self-doubt. But even then, there are little things i tweak to bring out the 2nd moment i enjoyed as well.
2nd Shot of Magpie Nest
Filtered 1st Shot of Magpie Nest
I find that stage, words, photography, song have one thing in common when it pursues beauty. And I wonder if you feel the same? Or perhaps, beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder. For me, it has to reflect Life. The risk in spontaneity or perhaps even the desperation to be in control, the perfect, and imperfect, the unexpected and predictability of it, and then on a 2nd level, the emotions that reflect it, be they, frustration, joy, happiness, desolation, yearning, epiphanous, brokenness, mourning, jubilation, gratitude….etc. And if it doesn’t, beauty for me sits like a porcelain vase on the shelf that needs to be broken, to be found out, …. for even the dust that lands on it would tell a story of age. Vulnerability is honesty at its utmost.
For my songwriting friends, consider keeping those unfinished songs in a journal (digital or not). Often my songs are finished at once, at a stretch. But i do have drafts of tunes that i wrote, scribbled, doodled on. I also keep the snippets of Garageband arrangements which i bounce out as unfinished mp3s. I recall listening to them months and years after i forgot about their existence running them randomly from a playlist i set in my ipod. Occasionally they lend ideas to the current ones, other times, they remind me where I used to be and keeps my writing in perspective.
I share this article “Mistakes Make The Art” re-shared from Austin Kleon (author of “Steal Like An Artist”)
Hosanna, photographed in 1865, shows Cameron’s propensity to focus on only one part of the image – if any (Credit: Victoria and Albert Museum, London)
‘One of the major ‘flaws’ of Cameron’s work was her blurred focus. It’s not clear if this came about deliberately or not…. Cameron herself said that her first successes in taking photographs with the kind of focus she wanted, like Annie, were “a fluke”….
But not wishing to create the impression that this was all a happy accident, Cameron added immediately: “That is to say when focussing and coming to something which to my eye was very beautiful I stopped there, instead of screwing on the Lens to a more definite focus which all other Photographers prefer.” A mistake became an act of rebellion against the status quo.‘
Julia Margaret Cameron Exhibit (UK)
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Juliet Pang is a poet first, singer then, songwriter after, a sharer of her life experiences for always.
L:linkedin.com/julietpang
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T: twitter.com/julietpang
