Creative Process - Intention

Red Tail Hawk by J. Binford-Bell

Yes, this is the second blog in the same day when I specifically stated that my intention was to do a blog a week on the creative process. But there I was walking around with my camera in my hand and thinking about intention.

I had my camera on the walk so my intention must be to take a picture or two or three though I will be honest and admit I have sometimes walked for hours and never lifted it to focus. But I have made myself a promise this year to take the camera with me everywhere (except when I intend deliberately not to take it but that is another blog) so I was out on my morning walk with the dogs and the Nikon D90 went with us. I don't, however, always take the entire camera bag with me. It gets heavier every time I have any money to spend. But I had been using my wide angle of late for those pond reflections featured earlier. I changed to my long lens this morning, checked the battery and the memory card.

My intention was clearly to not take sweeping vistas but to focus more narrowly on my world. My 70mm to 300 mm lens is good for long shots and oddly enough macros. I was looking for evidence that spring has begun to emerge from beneath the melted snow.

Great Mullen sprout

And it can get up close and personal with the pollen blossoms on the tall aspen trees. It was also a desire of mine to get a picture to post on Facebook.

Aspens in Spring by J. Binford-Bell

This photo above was to illustrate that aspens do bloom and that is why we are all sneezing currently. Amazing the number of people that only visit in the summer that have no idea why us locals all bemoan sneeze season. This is it. It was suppose to be a straight forward informational photograph but obviously subconsciously I wondered if one can make such a photograph interesting?

But I digress. We were talking intention. There were several intentions guiding me this morning, 1) use another lens, 2) get a photo of the tall aspens and their pollen pods, 3) look for distant wild life. If number 3 had been my only intention I would have walked around for quite a while not taking a picture. The Red Tailed Hawk didn't show up until I was finally back in my driveway.

My Neighbor

In short I think intention can be very different than focus. You can hold more than one intention in your mind at a time and therefore allow for serendipity. But had I gone out solely focused on snapping a picture of a hawk I would have set up on a tripod in a blind and probably not seen anything worth taking a picture of.

I think the same could apply to painting. If you narrow your focus on only one subject or one approach to that subject you may miss an awful lot of creative happenstance.