Lately I’ve been considering how artists create. Photography is a hobby for me, and I’ve been playing with it recently and trying to create. The trouble is I don’t have a clue what I’m doing. How do the best photographers do it? How do Stieglitz, Strand, Hine, and Adams take those pictures? What did they see when they looked through the viewfinder? And what’s the difference between what they saw in the viewfinder and the finished product? Do they construct an image within the viewfinder knowing they can later crop it? Or do they do as much cropping as they can when they actually take the picture? How much of the art of photography is done in the darkroom? The other thing I don’t understand is how do they capture such stunning shots of active situations? They take pictures of things that can’t be staged, yet the image is laid out like a masterpiece, as if they did stage it. Are they just lucky, in the right place at the right time? Or is there a skill involved in it? What about painting? What kind of an image of the final product does the painter have when they start? Or does it just come into being as the paint is applied? What about writing songs? Which comes first, the music or the words? In writing, I often find that the creation can come from both a preconceived idea and just the spontaneous act of writing. Sometimes I know what I’m going to write, other times as I type and it tells me what to write. Creating is a mind boggling thing. It requires such attention to detail, such mastery. It makes God that much more amazing, doesn’t it?