Years ago a very successful east coast metro photographer gave an interview for a podcast. When asked how he produced such gorgeous journalism-style wedding photos with no prior photography experience, he (somewhat arrogantly?) said he was entirely self-taught, and just got a good camera and that it really was wasn’t that hard.
Um, yeah. That was NOT my learning path. Compare:
Step One: Childhood on farm in Minnesota. Advantage: endless subject matter – the dragonfly on a grass blade. A leaf on the snow. Cattails in the wind. Disadvantage: no camera.
Step Two: Formative teenage years on farm in Minnesota. Advantage: bedroom wallpapered with pages from discarded National Geographic magazines. Disadvantage: Kodak disc camera. Resultant photos did not look like National Geographic magazine pages. Quit.
Step Three: Adulthood – residence in a major US metro area. Advantage: film SLR camera, access to community education photography courses. Disadvantage: self-diagnosis of “math” dyslexia, and the complete inability to form conceptual relationships between film speed, shutter speed, aperture and focal length. Numerous poor prints stored in large plastic Rubbermaid container. Quit.
Step Four: Residence in a new major US metro area. Advantage: digital SLR camera, and the infancy of online learning courses and YouTube videos. Slogged through technical tutorials. Disadvantage: made constant comparisons to photographs of exotic locales, such as HDR Grand Canyon panoramas, Venice gondolas under the full moon, long-exposure Paris streets at night, Angkor Wat in the fog. Quit.
Step Five: Residence in New Hampshire. Advantage: technical knowledge of the digital SLR camera, thanks to completion of countless hours of online photography tutorials. Disadvantage: became slave to tutorial rules. Must use rule of thirds. Must use a tripod. Must carry 20 lbs. of lenses, filters, reflectors. Exposure must appease the histogram god. Quit.
Present day: Rules denounced. No tripod. No heavy equipment. No comparisons to other photographers – only admiration for many (see Resources page). I shoot what I like, where I like. And I like farms, fields, forests, ponds. Especially conservation land. Quiet places. The dragonfly on a grass blade. A leaf on the snow. Cattails in the wind.
