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Going down the list of assignments extracted from Harold Davis article series Becoming a More Creative Photographer, the fourth assignment challenges you to post-process it like you mean it. Your assignment: Shoot a commonplace object with digital post-processing specifically in mind. Using your favorite image editing software, transform the photo of the commonplace object into something new and abstract. This was a tough one. I am still not sure I got there, but I took it as a change to get out of the usual comfort zone. Yes, color. No, monochrome. Yes, post-processed till you cannot tweak any more knobs to get the image you want. If the previous assignments got me warmed up, this could be soul crushing if I took it too seriously. Choosing the picture was actually easy. After a week of scratching my head, I remembered an itch. A snap I took while passing by Zürich back in June. I knew I wanted to do something with it, but never got my head around it. Monochrome did not make justice to the moment I released the shutter. The shoot of a bridal store front got my eye, memories, and imagination. It was bold. It was eye-catching. It was full of color. It was sitting there, ignoring and defying the sobriety that surrounded it. It also had another ethereal property: if you discretely check the people walking by it, almost every street-walker tried to hide their furtive glances. There was no option. This moment was the image I had to post-process. Monochrome was not going to cut it. It will lose the magnetism that challenged your gaze. Also, it was way out there on the left field of the comfort zone. So there I went and start post-processing trying to turn it into that giant magnet that trapped people’s imagination while walking by. Yes, I have to admit that I may have failed turning it into an abstract image, but this was exciting new territory and I guess I could not cover it in a single shoot. So, I just sat in front of the digital darkroom and post-process that moment like I mean it. ...

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. This exercise is a great way to reinvigorate your photography generally and get out of a rut. ...

[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? Should I just focus on one of the rules? Should I stop thinking about it or just stop thinking about it and let it permeate for a while? Hence, I decided to dig a bit more around just to see if I could make my mind about what path to take. ...

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. The results were published on a paper titled Toward routine billion-variable optimization using genetic algorithms if you are curious. Anyway, back on track. A few days ago, I was playing with Erlang and I coded, just for fun, [yet another cGA implementation, now in Erlang]({{ ref “/posts/yet-another-cga-implementation-now-in-erlang.md” >}} yet another cGA implementation, now in Erlang"). The code was pretty straight forward, so why not take another crack at it and write an Erlang version that uses some of the ideas we used on that paper. The idea we used on the paper was simple. Slice the probabilistic model into smaller segments and update all those model fragments in parallel. The only caveat, if you go over the cGA model, is that you need the evaluation of two individuals to decide which way to update the model. Also, you need to know when to stop, or when your global model has converged. The flow is pretty simple: ...