How to save the world by building a more efficient life
Amateur Creativity
We all need a little creative expression in our lives. This weekly post is an experiment in embracing that creative side, focusing more on the process than the outcome. Creative expression in these posts largely takes the form of music and photography.
November is a rather depressing month over here in Norway. But occasionally, a nice long cold spell comes along and freezes the lakes to create vast expanses of ice for skating.
I’m very happy to report that this November had a few precious days of beautiful black ice to enjoy:
Another fun thing to do on a large frozen lake is to sign your name using a GPS fitness tracker like Strava. It took me 1.5 km of back and forth skating to sign my first lake 🙂 I think this is actually an improvement on my usual handwriting!
A few weeks ago, I was treated to another quiet morning with some beautiful reflections on the lake close to my home.
The picture below reminded me of the power of compounding and, just like the Force in Star Wars, how it has a light side and a dark side. Life is rarely stagnant. Most of the time, this powerful force has us either spiraling up or spiraling down.
Some people spend more time spiraling up, others spend more time spiraling down. This is one of the key reasons for the vast inequalities in our society.
Today’s Amateur Creativity is a cover of a fun little song from Joshua Radin. It never reached enormous popularity, but for some reason, the tune just stuck in my head after I randomly heard it somewhere.
I also experimented a bit with a different camera perspective. Last time my poor phone was stuck to the ceiling. This time it was fixed to the guitar itself 🙂
A couple of weeks back, I emerged from the lake after a refreshing swim almost to be hit in the face by a dragonfly. That made me remember the nice new super slow-mo feature on my phone, perfect for filming kamikaze insects!
Getting a good shot was challenging since the phone can only capture 0.8 seconds at a time with a 30x slowdown. But with enough pointing and clicking I eventually got the footage for the short video below.
I never knew dragonflies glide so much. Learn something new every day 🙂
I tried to go a little more pro with this week’s Amateur Creativity. After moaning about the sound quality in my first piano recording two weeks ago, I took a trip to the music store to see if there are any convenient solutions.
Sadly, there were not. But I persevered and dug some old wires out of the cupboard to connect to my little home recording studio that has seen very little action in recent years.
Recording video and sound separately and then putting them together afterwards obviously takes more time. But the resulting quality is worth it!
I also decided to tape my phone to the ceiling to record from a different perspective. Looks pretty cool, I think 🙂
The word “consistency” is a regular on this blog. It’s generally associated with good health, personal finances and productivity. But believe it or not, it also has an art connotation.
“Consistency art” is anything where you do some small action consistently over an extended period of time to eventually create something beautiful.
There are many possibilities. With 10 minutes a day over a couple of months, you can come up with a very cool painting, composition or sculpture. Something like a perfectly shaped Bonsai tree is another example of consistency art.
My recent interest is long-term timelapse photography. I basically just take a photo from the same spot every once in a while and then add them all together later on.
The first attempt is shown below. It’s a nice illustration of the changing weather patterns in Norway.
I’m really looking forward to the change in seasons. Such a series of photographs should look very cool over the entire green-orange-brown-white-brown-green seasonal transformation in Norway.
The main challenge is getting the images to line up well. It seems there is no software that can do this automatically at present. Manual labor is therefore the only way, which is fine if the number of photos is small enough.
I’ll be exploring this a bit more over coming months. Let’s see what comes out of it eventually.
Have a pleasant weekend and I’ll see you on Monday!
Today’s little bit of Amateur Creativity is my cover of Yiruma’s “River Flows in You”. It’s one of those great pieces of music that is truly beautiful, but not particularly hard to learn.
That being said, playing it perfectly is very difficult. Professional performing artists are not paid to play 99% of the notes correctly (this is actually pretty easy). They’re paid for that last 1% (the really hard part). I realized this very clearly when recording this video.
But even when played imperfectly, River Flows in You remains a beautiful song 🙂 I hope you enjoy!
Another thing I recognized is the need for some wires to record directly from my piano to my phone. The sound over the headphones is just so much better than the sound over the speakers that was actually recorded.
I’ll commit to taking a trip to the music store to check this out before my next piano recording.
See you tomorrow!