Great Picture. What Camera Do You Use?

I am sure this has happened to you. You show a picture you took to a friend or colleague and they appreciate it by asking you the camera you used to take the picture. I encounter a similar situation now-and-then at work. When I present a storyboard, a prototype or product to colleagues, some of them promptly send me an email asking me the tool or template I used. This is amusing and sometimes annoying. It is almost like saying, "Surely you are not an artist. You can't be hard-working or skilled. You got to have some secret tools in your closet."

Most of the time they are disappointed with my answer when I tell them that there is no special tool. You just have a pick a tool you like and apply your methods, your knowledge your skill and repeat until you get it right.

I suspect, this behavior is driven by the industrial era, mass manufacturing mind set where the goal was to dumb down the tasks so much that any unskilled or semi-skilled person can build generic meaningless products that sort of met your needs and do it at a very low cost. I believe that the industrial era and even the information era is over. If you are not an artist at what ever you do, automation, outsourcing and abundance will get you. There will always be a machine or a lower paid person to replace you.

If you are interested in this topic, I have three book suggestions. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. The Rise Of The Creative Class by Richard Florida and Linch Pin by Seth Godin.

I am pretty sure you are not going to ask me what tool I used to create the Cartoon strip above. :)