[Editorial note: For those of you who are new here, I’m going to be branching out a little bit more with this blog, I think. At it’s core, it’s still going to be a photoblog, but I’m going to try to start including a weekly update that is a more general-purpose creative section. This will probably include some poetry, short stories, and essays about creative things. My goal is to update this section once a week on Sundays; I will still continue my sporadic photo updates on a “whenever I get done processing them” schedule.]
So, I’ve been really serious about this photography thing for just over a year now, and I feel like I’ve learned quite a bit, particularly technically. I know what f/stops should be used for what photos, and how to adjust white balance for particular lighting, and what exposure levels to use, and when to use a flash, and so on and so forth.
However, the one area that I still feel like I struggle with a lot is composition. A lot of my photos are either lucky, or use the time-honored technique of “taking a lot of photos and hoping that one turns out”. Now, I realize that both of these are pretty substantial parts of photography, but there’s a third component that I am sadly lacking in: patience.
I have become convinced that the absolute best photos require a tremendous amount of thought, and a lot of work to set up. It seems rather counter-intuitive, because the actual photo takes a few fractions of a second to take. Yet leading up to that can sometimes require as much work as if you were going to sit down and just paint the thing. My trouble is that I don’t have that much time or patience to really make some of my photos shine, so I end up resorting to other techniques to try to make up for it, as well as looking for ways to speed the entire process up. But some things just can’t be rushed.
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