In Search for Styles – Of Photography, Oil Painting, Music Creation, and Writing

What’s wrong with this picture?  I will tell you in a moment. 

Recently, I have become serious on photography.  As I put a pause on the sound of the shutter (too many photos to be processed), I reflect upon my different channels in expressing art.  Amazed by the similarities and differences, I have been working on this (series of) article(s) for a while for sharing.  Let’s see if this self reflection is inspiring or just a crazy man’s thought.

You would have thought if an artist has a certain style on one form of art, it would be consistent to other forms of art of his.  Yes?  Not quite so for me.  In fact, quite far off.

The music I create is dark.  Those find it hard to relate the feeling within find my songs depressing.  Those who connect would dive with me into this pool of abstract emotion.  However, when I write (since early teens), now blog, I tend to be positive and enthusiastic on what I observe.  And these two mature decades long hobbies of mine have been stabilised into a certain comfortable style.  The journey of exploration is overtaken by the journey of art mastery.

Oil Painting, on the other hand, is a new hobby of mine.  Unlike photography that the ‘machine’ captures the color of each pixel through the lens, to paint is to observe and replicate each pixel through naked eyes, pay attention to how light from different objects affect each other, and to put the colors onto the canvas.  It is a long process to create one picture.  Both hobbies require an artist to compose the picture, the mode of color replication triggers a discussion on tools versus techniques.

Photography is an odd hobby.  I could hypothetically pass my camera to a novice, tell him or her on what to shoot in what setting, and then here comes a reasonably beautiful picture.  If you spend a weekend reading the manual, you can probably start to operate on your new camera quite immediately.

You can’t do the same for a guitar, or a piano.  Learn to play a simple song takes weeks if not months.  It would literally take years for me to play Moonlight Sonata.  Not to state the obvious, I am sure you can extrapolate this theory to oil painting and writing.

I love taking picture on happy moments, beautiful scenery.  And if I was to apply my music style to photography, I would probably capture the moment of pain, lost, and despair.  I would probably head to Israel right now.

It is the same me.  But the style can be so different on different channels.  Why?

Maybe deep inside we are all multi-facet, having layers of personalities, and rings of memory like a tree trunk.  I think we humans enjoy to express ourselves, with the words we say and the things we do.  Who knows what kind of photographer or painter I would become?  What I know though is that it is such a joy to express art in different forms, different styles.  There can be synergy amongst different art channels.  You will see.

Answer to the question at the top: I have managed to find a way to mount my Nikon SB-900 flash gun onto a music mic stand and triggered that remotely through my Nikon D700 mounted on tripod.  I doubt if it is at all a common practice.  It is really cool because (1) I don’t need to spend money to buy another tripod for my flash gun (that is the usual way) and (2) I can hang my flash gun way above my head, way above where the maximum height as provided by the tripod with virtually any degree of freedom.