Space to play
In a composer's round table, Trent Reznor describes a sense of disappointment that all too often he’s using tricks he already knows how to do, he doesn't get to go into the ‘lab’ to experiment. This was quickly picked up by Hans Zimmer who joyfully described a recent experience of “getting to know the toys again”. But what is this sense and why is it important?
First, it's the experience of not being a master of something. When we're completely confident in something yes, it can be a sign of mastery of something, but it can also open the door to complacency and stasis as the challenge of a manageable learning experience isn’t there. This is an experience of humility and renewal in what we’ve already dedicated ourselves to which becomes more important, not less, the more we develop in that domain.
Second, it can be the sense that there’s an opportunity to develop experience with something unfamiliar. There's something that we can see on the hill ahead beckoning to us, drawing us forward to learn something completely new, expanding our horizons.
Third, it can derive from a sense that our vision is being narrowed by others as if blinkers have been put on us to constrain our vision. We’re directed to focus on the output: did that milestone get hit? Did we make the release schedule? Did we make the quarter? I’m going to hazard a guess that most people in MarTech didn’t get into the field because they want to spend their time in Excel, Teams or Jira. With our vision so constrained, it can become very easy to lose contact with what it was that drew us into the field, what gave us that childlike sense of joy. Also, with our vision constrained to output, it pulls us away from what becoming a master of what it is we’re responsible for. And this constrains our vision also to the next milestone or to the next step, the next five minutes.
Fourthly, and finally, we lose the capacity to play, to get to know the toys, as Zimmer puts it. With a few hours each week to play, who knows what we could find. In software, we might find some key piece of functionality that could enable us to solve problems that will otherwise go unaddressed. It might spark ideas for new functionalities or enable us to make connections that will solve user problems. Mistakes and dead ends will be plentiful, but so will productive possibilities that we’d otherwise never encounter.
These photos embody the above. As I become more familiar with Lightroom, learning from professional photographers and generally playing with the toys, I learn what’s possible. Mistakes and dead-ends are plentiful, but so are new ideas and experiences. The first photo is a new edit of an existing photo that I’d first edited immediately after getting Lightroom. This time, I looked at the upright tool to see what options I had for straightening the image. Using the ‘Full’ option directed Lightroom to try to level the photo horizontally and vertically. What it did was unexpected because the effect is similar to that used by Deckard in Blade Runner to analyse a photo. It’s not exactly the same, of course, because the technology isn’t at the same level. This is most clear from the painting in the reflection which has retained its perspective despite the angle of the photo seeming to change. I also needed to crop the photo to remove the empty canvas space created by the upright tool working the way it did.
No, I’d never enter this photo for a photography competition, but the experience is rewarding, opens the door to deploying it with deliberation in the future and has deepened my understand of Lightroom. It’s so good to have space to play.