Walkabout (a.k.a. How to apply The Art of War to Photography)

Cheng/Chì (Ortodox/Unortodox) is an idea from Sun Tzu's book The Art of War, that says that to win a battle, you need two things: Ordinary military forces, doing the tried and true things, and unorthodox forces, creating an element of surprise. The principle can be applied to any other art, as well as the art of war.

I used to do a lot of street photography. It is an easy way to get started in photography, but it is also one of the most difficult photographic genres for the simple reason that most of the time, there is nothing noteworthy to shoot.

I followed the rules when shooting street photos, but I also started doing other kinds of photos. Still with a city environment as background, but with a dinosaur, or a spaceship, slipped in to make the picture more interesting.

I haven't done that in awhile, so maybe I should start doing it again.
Technically, this picture is mostly an exercise in tone mapping and saturation mapping. I started using the techniques recently, and I am not entirely happy with them yet. Next time, I intend to work in 32 bit mode all the way through the process, to see if that makes a difference.

Practice

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

― Anton Chekhov

You may wonder, "why so many nudes lately?" Good question. I wish I had a really good answer, but I don't. Here is the closest I can come at the moment:

When I started with photography, I shot a lot of flowers to learn the basics of composition, and how to handle my camera in various lighting situations. I mean a lot of flowers! I shot more than 8,000 the first year, and more than 13,000 the second year. I was out shooting three times a day, every day.

After that, I was kind of done with flowers, but I had learned a bit about photography. After that, I did street photography, model photography, macro photography, levitation photography, flesh manipulation photography, portrait photography, some art photography, even tried my hand at pin-up photography.

Now, with nudes, I have found something as interesting to me as horror, Science-Fiction, and Fantasy photography. I want to learn more, and I want to integrate the nudes with the kinds of photography I've done earlier.

I have always been that way. I used to be a programmer, so I learned programming languages, then techniques of Object-Oriented programming, then design patterns, then project methodology, then systems thinking, queueing theory, Theory Of Constraints, statistics, military strategy, Chinese and Japanese military strategy...

And, I integrate it. I synthesize.

While I do not intend to do 21,000 nude pictures, there will probably be quite a few more, before I have integrated them fully in my repertoire.

Cheng/Chì

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If you read the picture caption, you already know that Cheng/Chì (Ortodox/Unortodox) is an idea from Sun Tzu's book The Art of War, that says that to win a battle, you need two things: Ordinary military forces, doing the tried and true things, and unorthodox forces, creating an element of surprise.

The principle can be applied to any other art, as well as the art of war. So, in the picture above, the street with all the ordinary people is the cheng, and the nude woman is the element of chì.

So, now you know how to apply the Cheng/Chí principle from Sun Tzu'z The Art of War.

Get out there and practice!

PS. The GDPR Thing!

You might wonder whether a picture like the one in this article breaks the new General Data Protection (GDPR) law. It does not. Journalistic images and art are exempt from the rules. That means it is okay to do street photography, it is okay to create digital paintings from street photographs, and it is okay to manipulate a photo taken in a street, if the purpose is to create a piece of art. You can read up on GDPR here.

Quick tutorial: Bringing out colors

A simple way to bring out the colors in a picture is to deliberately underexpose it. This rose was shot in aperture mode at 1/800s, f5.6, ISO 100. I deliberately underexposed the picture one full stop (-1 EV).

In Aperture, I started by clicking Autoenhance. Most of the time, this improves the picture quite a bit. I also tweaked the saturation (1.17) and the vibrancy (0.29) in Aperture. To give the picture a bit of extra pop, I also increased the definition quite a bit (0.71). I edge sharpened it a bit, and added a vignette.

Here is the original picture for comparison. As you can see, I have also removed a bit of junk from one of the petals.

Quite a lot of tweaking for one little flower, but good practice for greater things...

The abusive rose

The picture of the rose above was tagged as "abusive content" and blocked by Facebook when I tried to post it. Ridiculous, of course, but it is more than that.

Censorship on the Internet can easily turn into a big problem, a larger problem than the, sometimes nonexistent, problems the censors try to solve.

All censorship is based on rules. These rules are based on cultural standards. When we have a cultural melting pot, like the Internet, there is a strong tendency to create very tight rules of censorship, so as not to offend anyone.

The problem is that no matter what you show, say, or do, there is always someone that will take offense:

There are people who are deeply offended by: The sight of female hair (on the head), scientific methods (for example creationists), nipples, voting rights for women, people with dark skin, people with white skin, female hair (in armpits), nudity, the hijab (Islamic veil)... The list is endless.

If you create ethical standards based on the idea that you may not offend anyone, then you end up creating algorithms that ban roses.

I must admit, I am deeply offended by this.

Awhile ago I had another photo banned by Google. It was a photo of Carl Milles famous Poseidon statue. The statue is located at Götaplatsen in Gothenburg, right at the end of the Avenue, the largest, busiest street in Gothenburg. The Poseidon statue is nude. Thousands of people pass by every day, without any ill effects.

I made a censored version of the Poseidon picture and put it on a t-shirt. You can read about it here.

Google lifted the ban after a couple of days, but the problem remains: The idea that what can be shown or said, discussed, and thought, should be defined by the most narrow minded among us.

Maybe it's time for a new t-shirt, with a rose this time.