How to remember everything you learn about Photography

[jona100]

The problem with learning any new subject is that there seems too much to learn, you read the books and there just seems to be pages and pages of stuff to memorise; and when you try and put it into practice with your camera in your hand, all that stuff you tried so hard to remember has vanished out of your head.

The problem is your memory, no you are not going senile there is actually nothing wrong with your memory at all; the problem is how you are trying to memorise stuff. When we learn things, we typically do by repetition, its how we were taught at school, however the human brain makes the connections needed to store things in memory far quicker and far more permanently by another method, a method that the human species are designed by nature to use.

What has this got to do with photography? Well like any creative form, there is the technical part and the creative part, to excel you need to know both. The creative part is something that comes from within, but the technical part is the bit you need to learn, to read up on, to take classes’ e.t.c. The bit you need to remember.

I am going to tell you how to get all that technical stuff stay in your head and for it to stay there. All without pacing the room for hours desperately repeating what you have read over and over again.

The fun part is it involves Sex & Violence (no I am not kidding).

Oh yeah, and it’s dead easy too.

What’s your favorite movie?, I bet you can replay whole scenes from your favorite movie in your head immediately, why can you remember a hundred different actors expressions, positions & movements but find it hard to remember the rules of composition?

The answer is movies are visual, when you play the scene in your head from your favorite movie you are recreating images associated with something in your head; human beings are hard wired to work like this; we are a visual species, we interact with the world and take information in with our eyes. It’s why our hearing and sense of smell is lousy but our eye sight is excellent.

To remember a whole big list of items and notes you simply turn them into visual representations.

Take the following list of ‘eye attractors’ in a photograph:
• Eyes
• Sharpness
• Brightness
• Colour against a monochromatic background
• Areas of high contrast
• Complimentary colour

To visualise this simply imagine a place you know very well as a location (your house, your school, your back garden, your office e.t.c), now turn all the above into physical items in your mind, for eyes imagine a huge eye ball, for Sharpness perhaps a big 20 foot steak knife, for brightness maybe you would think of a light bulb, for ‘Colour against a monochromatic background’ think a beautiful flower growing out of a patch of green grass, for high contrast a zebra, for ‘complimentary colour’ maybe a green robot with Big Red demon eyes.

Now stick all those in a ‘mini-movie’ in your mind interacting one after another, and make it as surreal, over the top and as ludicrous as possible; the sillier it is, the more you will remember it.

Try visualising this:

A big light bulb is hanging out of the sky illuminating the land, brilliantly bright and brighter than the sun, a big bloody eyeball flies up to it for a closer view but starts to weep due to the intense brightness burning its retina, suddenly the light bulb shatters and hundreds of razor sharp steak knives fly out in every direction one manages to slice the eyeball in two. The steak knives fall to earth like arrows, one hits the ground and transforms like a magic trick into a beautiful bunch of flowers growing on a sports field, the flowers are quite beautiful and stretching out to the sky to bask in the bright light; out of nowhere a big zebra falls to earth and lands smack bang on the flower squashing it dead. The zebra staggers to its feet (still stunned slightly from the 2 mile drop out of the sky) but is startled by a something behind it, a robot not a toy robot but a 30 foot evil bright green robot like something out of ‘The Day the Earth stood still’, drop kicks the zebra out of view, the evil green robots hands are out stretched like Frankenstein and its lumbering along with big bright pulsing red demon eyes moving closer and closer to you.....

Quite possibly the most ludicrous image possible I think you will agree, no possible basis in reality; and that’s the point. Run this through your mind a few times and you will never forget it, and now rest of your life you will always know the primary attractors to the eye in a photography.

The key to the whole thing is ALI (association, location and imagination). associate what you want to remember into objects, people or something, place them in a location you know well, now let you imagination run wild connecting them together. Use Sex, violence, exaggeration, movement, dancing, smashing, kissing add as much detail as you can, if you are not happy with your movie, you’re the director, re-shoot it in your head.

Now I said I wasn’t joking about the sex and violence, because I wasn’t, sex and violence stick in the memory better nearly almost anything; think about it. What are the two most famous scenes in the movie ‘Alien’, easy isn’t it; the chest bursting scene and Ripley stripped down to her underwear at the end, those two scenes are remembered more than any other in the film. Even if you haven’t seen the film for a long time, you can picture those scenes exactly as they were filmed.

Sex & Violence use it in your ‘memory movies’.

That probably sounds a lot doesn’t it? it actually isn’t; it takes far longer to read than it does to do, all you had to do was turn a bunch of words into objects or representations and stick them all together in a surreal movie in your mind. You can use it for a list many items long, 30 items in a memory movie can be replayed in your mind in less than 10 seconds.

This is the method that fortune 500 CEO’s and world leaders use to remember the huge reams of data they need to know; they are most certainly not pacing the room reciting over and over again things they are trying to remember.

Don't want to use a single location or can’t think of one? Use a familiar route you know well (your journey to work, a walk around you house), place the visual representations at landmarks along the route (your front door, on top of your car, the traffic lights e.t.c), then float through the route in your mind. Just make sure you add movement and exaggeration to it, there is no way you will forget it now.

If you have problems associating an item with a visual image use ‘sound-alikes’, i.e. items whose names sounds similar to the items you want to remember (e.g. for Symmetry you could imagine a tree with a big pot simmering on top ‘simmer tree’).

The system is so good, when you replay the memory movies, you don’t even a need a clear picture in your mind of the object just a hint of it reminds you and you can zip through your whole movie in a fraction of a second, and have reams of information to hand that would take years to remember through repetition.

Oh yeah, here is a real big added bonus for photographers, by visualising these memory movies you automatically increase you visualisation skills, and become far more visually aware. A rather handy skill for a photographer.

[FoG]

I reckon some good laminated cards with tips for landscapes etc would be a great idea so you have an instant help in hand when out and about ..... I know a mag in the UK had some recently and I typically missed that one

[TerryMC]

That's another way of improving memory by association. Better and faster to use cheat sheets. Just like the way we did it for school exams.

I thought CEO have highly paid people to do the remembering for them. Not to mention carrying the cell phone as well.

[beth0b]

Practice...

If you read and read and read, not too much will stick. If you apply what you learn in practice then you will get it much quicker! Try it. Read about a concept and then test it out with your own camera. Then build upon it. Read about something else, and then figure it out on your own camera. Repeat... you will remember the functions and features and tips much more quickly with that hands on experience.

[deltacsar665]

Well, photography is like riding a bike. Once you get the hold of it, you will never forget

[daft_biker]

Never try to remember. Always try to understand.

[Aegea]

When you said movie-eyeball-knife I immediately thought of the scene in Le Chien Andalou with the eyeball and the razor ... that's two factors I won't forget again!

[Nicole]

Thanks for that interesting post I think we all remember / learn things in different ways, so I'm sure that there will be plenty of people out there who find this quite useful.