Dear Friends,
Hello and greetings from cold, snowy Minnesota on this first Sunday in February 2022. Thank you so much for subscribing to A Twenty Percent Creative and for your support as I embark on this new creative project. Today, I am happy to deliver the first issue of my newsletter to your inbox. Please enjoy and best wishes for a creative week ahead.
Warm regards, Jeff
☑️ My Board of Directors
For the last decade or so, I’ve wanted to be a writer - the verb, not necessarily the vocation. The kind of person who writes routinely for the simple joy of writing. Rather than being aware and reminded of the words bouncing around in my mind, I have wanted to devote quality time to expressing my thoughts through words — sharing life’s moments and lessons learned by filling the blank page in front of me.
Unfortunately, I have let life speed along without welcoming the writer in me to have a voice as one of my daily board of directors. Instead, I have allowed some of my louder, persuasive board members - the pessimistic manager, the problem solver, the screen time enthusiast, and the night owl - to steal my attention, build detrimental habits, and basically direct my life. Subconsciously yet obvious to me now, I furloughed the writer in me leaving this important voice on the board dormant and atrophied.
Thankfully, I finished 2021 with a renewed sense of purpose and focus on being fully present for life’s moments that are most important to me - health, family, friends, creativity, spirituality, and helping others. I’ve put my intrusive board members on notice. No longer will latest and loudest guide my time. The days of important things in life being left as “if I have time” activities are over. I’m excited to reinstate the writer in me to my daily board of directors for he has much to say, do, and share with you in 2022.
☑️ Photo 365: Still Life Peppers
36 days into 2022
36 photos added to my photo-a-day project.
I am happy with the collection so far.
but…..
Wow, I am finding January and February in Minnesota to be a really challenging time to do a photo-a-day project. I have had few days where the temperatures were warm enough to be outside for reasonable amounts of time. Friday, for example, I went to my favorite lake nearby for sunset. It was sunny with few clouds in the sky. It was also 7℉ (-13℃) with a wind chill making it feel like -10℉ (-23℃). It was so cold that my camera literally and technically froze after 15 minutes. I guess that is one way to end a photowalk. Thankfully, my camera thawed out during the warm car ride home and is working just fine once again.
Unsurprisingly, most of my photos thus far for the project have been made indoors. I have really enjoyed the challenge of making still life photographs as well as portraits of my kids and our dog at home without fancy lights, external flash, backdrops, or other studio photography gear.
My still life photography has had a bit of a recurring theme over the last 5 weeks — produce, patterns, and pottery. I have really enjoyed the hunt around my house for interesting props to create reflections, textures, and shadow patterns when photographing store bought fruits and vegetables like apples, pears, cherry tomatoes, and bell peppers to name a few.
Most days, I am setting up my “still life photography studio” after 11 P.M. When making still life photographs at night, I am turning off all of the lights in the kitchen and setting up scenes on our dark colored kitchen countertops. Within the darkness, I am using constant, directional, artificial light provided by the flashlight from my iPhone SE. In these low light scenarios, I am pushing the ISO of my Fujifilm XT3 from 6400 to 10000 to get a reasonably fast shutter speed (1/60 to 1/125) capable of producing a sharp image. The resulting photographs are full of noise, grain, and texture. For those of you that have followed my photography for a while, you know that I am used to making pictures in harsh, midday sunlight. So, these still life photographs are a huge learning opportunity for me. I have learned so much already by seeing the scenes on the back of my camera as well as reviewing the results during the post-processing phase on my computer. I am excited to take the skills I am practicing indoors now and apply them to night photography outdoors when the weather improves in the coming weeks.
Here are two photographs I took in the second week of January where I used my “still life photography studio” when photographing a trio of peppers. I love how the peppers became wrinkled over a period of 10 days. It was interesting to see how the skin of the peppers interacted very differently with the light on day 1 versus day 10.
On sunny mornings, I like to observe and photograph shafts of sunlight leaking through our kitchen window. In the photograph below, I positioned an orange bell pepper in a wedge of light on the counter near the window. I proceeded to photograph it exposing for the highlights in the scene. Initially, I didn’t notice the reflections and shadows of the pepper within the scene. After taking a dozen or so images and adjusting my camera settings for the changing light, I ultimately saw the interesting frame I had created. It is a fun photograph to unpack as the shadows and reflections are caused by both direct sunlight as well as indirect sunlight reflected off the countertops.
The last photograph I am sharing below was taken in the entryway of our home. At night, light from our front porch lamp softly spills through the window in our front door. It casts light and shadows diagonally on the wall of our entryway. Seeing the potential in the scene, I positioned a red bell pepper on the entryway table as seen below. I lit the pepper using my smartphone flashlight.
I hope the resulting photograph taken in the entryway mirror was somewhat unexpected and caused you to pause. For me, I love how much texture and grain was infused into the photograph under these low light conditions. The red pepper definitely demands attention in this color photograph whereas the light and lines are most prominent in the black and white version.
I’m curious — has this series inspired you to try still life photography at home? If it has, please reach out to me if you share the photographs publicly. I would love to see them and hear the story of how you brought them to life.
☑️ Three Talented Creators
MALIKA FAVRE
Thanks to the Instagram explore page, I was introduced to the stunning work of French artist, Malika Favre @malikafavre. Malika, a tremendously talented illustrator and graphic artist living in Barcelona, creates vector illustrations that are masterpieces of negative space, minimalism, light, shadow, and color. Her work showcased on her website, malikafavre.com, and Instagram is bold, distinct, and unforgettable. Her art makes me want to learn how to transform my photographs and other ideas in my mind into vector illustrations. Malika has worked with an impressive list of clients, is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, and is represented by one of the most well known illustration agencies in the world.
TEO CRAWFORD
Teo Crawford is a photographer and film student based in Austria. I first learned about Teo during episode #170 of the Kris Karl Photography podcast [shameless plug: I was interviewed for episode #35; April 5, 2020]. I am a huge fan of Teo’s Youtube channel and enjoy the photography he shares at @teo_crawford on Instagram. On Youtube, Teo publishes interesting, behind-the-scenes videos of his photography excursions. He does a tremendous job explaining his thought process and critiquing his results.
In addition to watching his videos, I often listen to them while post-processing my own photos. His voice and accent are fantastic — a voice artist in my opinion! If you have thirty minutes to spare this week, please check out these two video essays: “What is a Theme in Photography?” and “I over-analysed a photograph.”
COSTAS MILLAS
About a year ago, I first became aware of the remarkable iPhone food photography of Costas Millas, @madebymrmillas on Instagram. Mr. Millas — a food stylist, photographer, and recipe developer from the UK — beautifully composes refined, balanced, edible scenes infused with color, details, and visual rhythm. If you want to push your taste buds and creativity into overdrive, you need to visit www.madebymrmillas.com. While there, please be sure to check out the Stories page where strawberries, squash, and rhubarb take center stage.
☑️ Email Productivity Tip
THE SCENARIO: You use Gmail for your work or personal email client. It is Sunday. You have a series of email messages that you need to send to your collaborators. It would be great if they can read and respond to the messages on Tuesday morning.
THE PROBLEMS:
It is the weekend. You don’t want to see all of the unread messages waiting for you in your email inbox. Perhaps, you are easily distracted by unread email messages and can easily find yourself reviewing them for ‘immediate actions.’
You have agreed with your collaborators to send email messages during business hours only. You want the email messages you are sending to your collaborators to be near the top of their inboxes on Tuesday morning.
MY APPROACH:
I only send and respond to emails using Google Chrome on my laptop. I removed my work email from my iPhone a long time ago as it was a constant distraction and a source of unnecessary stress. As Gmail is a web-based email client, every email message has a URL (we will revisit this in a future issue). When logged into my Google account, I use the following universal URL to open a “compose new email message” window within the web browser. https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1
The window has the same functionality as Gmail (ie you can access contacts, use your email signatures, etc.) but is not located within Gmail. I can send email messages without seeing my email inbox or the unread messages waiting for me.
I use this compose new email message URL quite often. I have it set up as a bookmark in my Chrome bookmarks bar. Extra bonus: If you start a message using this URL and get pulled away to do something else, Google will auto-save the draft message and makes it available in your drafts folder within Gmail.
Gmail has a great ‘schedule send’ feature too. When preparing email messages at a time that is convenient for me, I often use ‘schedule send’ to deliver messages to the recipients at the appropriate time to see and act on them. The ‘schedule send’ feature is found by clicking the down arrow next to the send email button. Once you click ‘schedule send’, you can select the date and time for the email message to be sent.
Do you encounter scenarios like this frequently? If you are a Gmail user, I hope these techniques bring you value. What strategies work for you to stay one step ahead in your email messaging?
☑️ A Few Random Facts About Me
Five artists whose music I have been listening to recently within Apple music
Method Man
Glass Animals
Ollie Chanin
Ella Frank
Russ
I am an ISTJ personality type according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
My single game high score in bowling is 287.
☑️ A Podcast Episode I Enjoyed This Week
“Dan Pink on the Power of Regret and Living With It”
What’s Essential Podcast
Host: Greg McKeown, author of one of my favorite books, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less.
☑️ What Should I Write About in Future Issues?
I have set up a google form to capture your suggestions. You can provide suggestions anonymously or enter your name in the appropriate field if you would like me to attribute the suggestion to you if I write about it in a future issue of the newsletter.
Instagram: @jeffreymkarp
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Well done Jeff - not just a mailshot but virtually a magazine. A fascinating read and great breadth.