This past summer, Steve Portigal and Dan Soltzberg spread a blanket and sat down to talk about the Creative Process and the art of Noticing. It’s about as Meta a concept as you can get when thinking/talking about the creative condition…Bonus points awarded for tying into Zen Mindfulness. Excerpt below with links to full article.

There’s an interesting noticing-plus-time version as well. For example, while traveling through Japan earlier this year, I took 1,400 pictures in two weeks. Maybe a sign or person would catch my eye or activate my “spider sense.” In many cases, I only knew that something was up, that there was a point of interest to capture. As a photographer, I’ve learned to hear that voice and take the shot whenever that happens. In a place like Japan at times I wouldn’t know what it was I was documenting or even be able to explain why I was taking the picture (beyond describing the scene as “cool”). But once I’d noticed something and photographed it, chances were good that I’d notice it again—as if that click of opening the shutter coincided with the creation of a new info-capture zone in my brain.

This process of noticing once and then noticing again is how you start finding patterns and uncovering themes.

Here’s the link.