Originally posted on April 3, 2009 on my blog: http://wp.me/pln3k-4K

NOTE: All images via Creative Commons Licenses from flickr users.

Salaam to all, and peace.

With this vast world we live in today, there are many different skills and little tidbits of information that float around everywhere. I’m just here thinking and contemplating on how knowing a skill or studying something can really change your view of the world.

I’ll give a few examples of what I mean.

I started studying and learning about film/video-making awhile back, and have been hooked on it ever sicne. I learned about cinematography, the rule of thirds, the way metaphors are used in films, actual camera controlling and even color corrections. Now, exactly what knowledge I obtained doesn’t matter for the purposes of the point I’m trying to make. Now, with all this newfound knowledge, I go to the movies. I’ll never be able to watch a movie the same way again. It’s so hard to NOT notice those small things that you never noticed before. You observe the way things are placed in the scene. You notice that probably 99% of the time, the subject of the scene is not in the center. You notice that the movie was too cheap to edit out once scene where there’s an itty bitty sneak peak of the boom microphone in the shot. It’s an amazing curse. It’s as if you don’t get to enjoy the movie as you ever did before, and you get to enjoy the movie in an amazing way for the first time appreciating every detail of the way it was constructed. It’s truly astounding.

Another example would be the bulk of my childhood. I spent a lot of time writing poetry (starting at the age of six years old) and even more time recording hip hop songs from that poetry. Learning a bit about musical composition, vocal variation, proper microphone techniques, use of audio editing programs, a little keyboarding, and my entire experience made my ears very keen to any music. With just a little bit of knowledge about how music is made, you can never listen to it the same again. I could hear the reverb and echoes and pitch change in the voices of Nasheed artists. I noticed the light bass in the drum beat of a hip hop track. I noticed even the great analogies used in the lyrics (due to my poetry writing). It’s a whole new view of the world.