One thing I’ve noticed as I approach photography seriously is that it’s not just about learning new stuff, like all those technical aspects of photography. It’s not all learning about ISO and shutter speeds and aperture values and how to compose photos and more. It’s also about unlearning old habits that were ingrained from years of my cell phones being my primary photo-taking devices.
In the case of this particular photo, the lesson is that I can’t just take the “Whip out my phone and take the picture” approach to using an actual camera. I need to slow down, compose, and make sure my focus isn’t screwed up. The result was this particular photo of a winning sunflower blossom at the Erie County Fair (more on the Fair to come sometime soon). I didn’t compose a very good shot, and the subject is blurry.
Oh well, I’m sure I am far from the first person to combat these difficulties in this particular pursuit!
I keep having to remind myself of something that I’ve heard from numerous photographers since I’ve started actively studying it: that on any shoot they may take several hundreds, or even into the thousands, of exposures and only end up with a small percentage of those being “usable”. That’s heartening, a bit; even the pros likely have terrabytes worth of external storage full of photographs that will never see the light of day. I do end up wondering how on Earth anyone got good at this back in the days of film, but that’s a question for another time….
