HAMBURGER EYES

Photo by Zane Grant

What does productivity mean to you? I feel crazy busy these days but not productive at all. And when I am not productive is when I start feeling annoyed with myself. 

For me, making stuff is productive. Shooting photos is the input and showing them is the output. This feels like the machine of productivity that I am used to and want to be part of. 

Getting rid of massive amounts of stuff feels productive. Clearing space for new ideas feels productive. 

Running around town doing errands does not feel productive, but laundry does. Social media does not feel productive, but blogging does.

I don’t even know where I am going with this. I think prioritizing what is most important is what productivity is. In our case, photography. 

Warren Buffet said something along the lines of, “Write down 20 of the most important goals and things you need to do and accomplish. Spend a lot of time on it. Then take the top 3, and throw the rest away.”

This is Ed Templeton signing copies of his latest book at Arcana Books. One of the best photo books stores on the planet and it happens to be 2 minutes from my house.

I was blogging about how different editing for books is vs. editing for zines, prints, and internet. Each seems to have its own dialect, boundaries, and obstacles. As you get older you find out that you may be more fluent in some of these languages than others.

It’s easy to say that a “winning” photo would translate on any medium, sure. But that is the short game. The long game isn’t about 1 photo, it’s about all of your photos and how you choose to set them free into the world. Maybe one will end up on a wall in a mansion in Malibu, maybe a big group of them will end up in a book on a shelf at the thrift store.

When you are making these things you get into the subtle dimensions like paper texture, ink texture, stiffness of cover, etc. Then you have the literal dimensions of the book and the spine width. Then you have the 4th dimension of time, the physical flipping of the pages and the sequencing of photos.

On the other hand, on a blog there is scrolling. And it is infinite. There are screen dimensions vs website dimensions. There are your resolutions vs their resolutions. And there is a built in attention deficit disorder meter running.

I am probably over thinking it, but all this is part of the craft. If we are to be called photographers, then we are to be called craftsmen I think.