To What Purpose?

O - Organize
N - Notes

Don’t buy into the philosophy that it’s not the destination, it’s the trip. Instead, consider the concept of using 'atomic reaction' to intensify your creative energy. This idea is designed to inspire and motivate you, getting you to a point where the trip has taken you. You’re only interested in the result.

However, you need to get your thinking organized and collected.

Some of the information once kept in small, pocket-sized notebooks by photographers like Ed Weston and Ansel Adams is now contained within the metadata of your digital photographs. All the mechanicals are there. Shutter speed, f-stop, ISO, and time and date are permanently recorded in the original file. There is no need to worry about that.

Your notes should capture the transcendent moment when it becomes clear that what started as a simple idea has transformed into something emotionally tangible. Write that down. Reveal your own emotions about the trip, the result, and the success.

Artist Julia Cameron suggests morning pages as a cathartic, ritualistic writing process that clears your mind, builds confidence, and creates a path for greater creativity. One liberating aspect of Cameron’s morning pages is there isn’t an intent to write for reference. Morning pages are written to expose process and result. The writing should be raw, expressing the emotional content of the moment. These notes need never be seen.

Don’t worry about penmanship, staying between the lines, spelling, capitalization, or structure as you write your notes. Just write what you’re thinking. Write about the emotional trip you just traveled. This isn’t a point to hold back, to fear writing something that would irritate or reveal aspects of yourself that you fear or others might criticize.

Of course, the trip's purpose was the creative result of the process. People who see the result will express joy at your accomplishment, the art you’ve created. That is as it should be.

Consider how you’ve changed as you’ve taught yourself to look at making photographs, how you traveled through the creative process from concept to reality to reaction, and how transformative the process was.

Don’t misunderstand. You might only be slightly transformed. It may not have been a life-altering moment when the heavens were revealed, and voices commanded adherence to a new set of rules replacing all others.

Slow is fast. Like an artist’s sketches, each minor alteration, each small change, moves toward the next iteration of an idea. Travels a similar but singular path toward increased creativity.

Remember that these notes are only for you. They are intended only to express the moment that brought you to the trip's conclusion. They are not for anyone else. Their intent is for you to understand the process of creativity and nothing more.

This might be the most important point of “ATOMIC REACTON.”

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