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Summer 2013. Roaming around Girona. Visiting corners long forgotten. Taking déjà vu turns. Permanent ephemeral moments.

Another week, another photography assignment extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer. The third assignment reads as follows: Your assignment: Wait until you are feeling no inspiration and stuck in a rut. Choose a single lens, set it at a single focal length, and use aperture-preferred metering to choose one f-stop. Start taking photos. I guarantee that you will be surprised with what you come up with....

[Halsman defines creativity and imagination as Une Tournure D’Esprit in his book The Creation of Photographic Ideas.]({{ ref “/posts/une-tournure-desprit.md” >}} “Una Tournure D’esperit”) He also proposed a set of rules to help developed your photographic creativity. Some target your logic thinking, some target your unconscious. I was tempted to start practicing Halsman rules, but they felt a bit daunting and I was a bit lost on where to start. Where they written in order?...

Back in Fall 2006 I was lucky to be at the right place, at the right time. Kumara Sastry and David E. Goldberg were working to pulverize some preconceptions about how far you could scale genetic algorithms. As I said, I was lucky I could help the best I could. It turned out that the answer was pretty simple, as far as you want. The key to that result was, again, built on Georges Harik’s compact genetic algorithm....

I still do not own a copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment. It seems hard to get a decent copy at a reasonable price. However, Philippe Halsman’s The Creation of Photographic Ideas has been on my shelves for quite a while now. In the book opening, Halsman defines creativity and imagination as une tournure d’esprit-–or a mental attitude and ability which can be directed developed. Although this resonated strongly the first time I read the book, successive readings have let me to a different crossroad....