The abundance of less

The intention of voluntary simplicity is not to dogmatically live with less. It’s a more demanding intention of living with balance. This is a middle way that moves between the extremes of poverty and indulgence. – Duane Elgin

I don’t like having clutter in my home. I find a space filled with stuff impedes with my mental clarity and productivity. I therefore greatly enjoy cleaning my home and tidying up my working space. It gives me great satisfaction when I am in a space with a lot of room to breathe.

There is no surprise to see my lifestyle philosophy spills over to my creative practice – namely my photography. I cherish simplicity with photography, be it with composition or post processing. Simplicity is straightforward, but one should not confuse the concept as plain and boring. To quote Buddhism, it is to hit the “middle way”, to achieve just the right balance for the message you wish to convey. Providing enough information to capture your viewers’ attention, get your message across, and hopefully leave your viewers with a strong impression.

I understand minimalism is all the rage nowadays when it comes to photography. To me, minimalism is more of a design style, wishing to put as few elements in a frame as possible, whereas with simplicity, it is about a philosophy, a way of life. Simplicity has to do with the clarify of thought, vision, and message. To look at an image created with simplicity in mind, all the distractions are eliminated, our eyes are directed immediately to the point of intention.

When I am working out in the field, I try my best to distill my ideas down to their essence. First, I ask myself what is the single most element that draws me to the scene, and specifically what message I wish to convey to the viewers by focusing on that one element. If I cannot answer those two questions succinctly myself, then I am not going ahead because the simple criteria cannot be satisfied.

If my criteria are satisfied, then I will move around my subject, changing perspective, changing the angle, or changing the point of view to make a strongest case for my composition. Most of my effort is to make sure I make the most convincing case for my subject by putting it in the most agreeable place in the composition. I may move further back to give my subject more breathing room it needs, or I may move in closer to emphasize certain details of a scene when there is a lot of chaos to strengthen my point. In recent years, I have done a lot of intimate scenes where I pick and emphasize a couple of simple elements out of a wide landscape view, so the viewers have a sense of the environment I am in without being overwhelmed by too much information. By doing so, I believe my images become more personal.

From years of experience, I also learn to look for scenes that provide fewer elements to work with, or places that I have the confidence to find orders in chaos. It’s no surprise I love snow, with just a few inches of snow on the ground, it covers up a lot of distracting elements, and it is obvious everything pops against a white background, making your subjects stand out.

I like to convert my some of my color images into black and white, by eliminating the colorful elements, the composition is pared down to lines, shapes, forms and texturse. But even with color images, I have learned to embrace paring down the color palette to fewer colors, or down to a couple of strong colors if possible.

Finally, I always check all the edges of the frame to see if there are tiny bits and pieces that will pull my attention away from the composition. I remember in years back I watched a video of the famous photographer and printing instructor Charles Cramer discussing one of his own images. He asked the audience which one element they thought Ansel Adams would eliminate in the frame, it turned out to be a tiny tree branch that jutted out of the corner of the frame, by eliminating it, not only did it clean up the edge nicely, it also showed the tremendous care the photographer shown to his work. I think we need to be the best detectives when it comes to simplifying what are being put in the frame. No one element should escape our attention.

Simplicity is a way of seeing and communicating our viewpoints. It is a way of life. In our modern world with so much complexity, I enjoy the moment of pause when I see an image that is distilled down to its essence.