Do, More Than Study

I tend to want to learn it all, right now. I pick a hobby-du-jour and go out to find all the websites and all the books I can on it, and read like mad, to try to learn as much as I can as fast as I can.

This time around with photography has been different, though. I spent the first month doing nothing but take pictures, reading very few webpages, and no books. I have questions, to be sure, but I'm letting them simmer. And after the first month, instead of running back to study-mode, I decided to just expand a little bit, from "just taking pictures" to planning a little bit more of what I'm going to take, (in some cases by trying to copy the ideas I find in others' photos), and leaving the study for after Christmas (when perhaps I'll get some gift certs for some books, hint hint).

And what I'm finding is that as I'm doing, I'm building up some much more meaningful frameworks in my mind, making some of my early questions fade away as irrelevant, and causing others to become much more well defined. This way, (mind you, I'm guessing here) when I do go hit the books, what they're saying will have some nice, appropriate mental structures to fall into, rather than under my old system, where I throw everything at a wall and hope some of it will stick.

I'm so very curious how this experiment will turn out, that I'm quite enthused to leave the books shut for now. (I'll keep ya posted...)

What I'm Learning

There's a zen saying that from one thing, you can learn 10,000 things. Here are some non-photographic things I'm learning from photography:

I will run out of ideas. I will also get more.

Newness wears off, but there's still joy to be had in the doing. More joy, potentially, than exists in the newness.

The simple things you do at the beginning don't really box you into one certain path. In fact, nobody really pays attention to the simple things you do at the beginning.

It might take more than a minute's thought. Corollary: there's always another way to do it. The sweetest fruit isn't necessarily the low-hanging fruit, and you're not going to jump to the top of the tree in one bounce.

Don't be afraid to copy (other's ideas, anyway). In fact, this is probably the best way to get going.

Similarly, from cycling:

No pain doesn't mean no gain. It might mean slower gain (or not), but might mean I'll stay with it, too.

Enjoy the doing. You'll never get anywhere, let alone get to all the fun places those with experience seem to be, if you don't enjoy the doing along the way.

Photography

Okay, so I have a zillion hobbies. Back a month or so ago, Wife wanted a new, smaller camera, and I went through a hobby-du-jour moment of wanting to take pictures. I put it off, as I have these moments fairly frequently, but as the topic persisted around our home, I had something come to mind.

I had been perusing photo groups on Flickr.com, and had found one called Project365. The idea is that you take one (or more) picture(s) a day, and post it to this group, every day, for a year. No more and no less than one picture from each calendar day, no taking 7 pictures today and uploading them one at a time for the next week.

It was an approach that I'd never really tried before. Taking one picture takes mere seconds (if you have the camera in hand, or a minute maybe if you don't). Knowing that you can only post one picture means you have *zero* incentive to take all of the neat pictures you can think of, because you can only post one from a given day's shooting. You have to spread it out over a long time.

So I'm currently somewhere around 40 days into this. It's been an interesting process, and I'm learning some interesting things (which I'll post shortly). And 365, here I come.

(My photo page, FWIW, is here.)