A Professional Amateur ~

I love a good, loud headline. Gets my attention, which is exactly the point. So I was pleased to open up an online article from Modern Lens Magazine that told me These 7 Bad Habits Scream "Amateur Photographer." Scream, mind you. How's that for an opening act? Apparently, being an amateur is not fit for respectable folk, so I figured it was up to me to do some deconstructing.

Anyway, I'm not sure professional is necessarily the opposite of amateur; both are fluid and somewhat slippery concepts. Neither is an automatic indicator of talent or the lack thereof; it's pretty much a matter of where the 1099's get sent. I know many an amateur creating -- and selling, if they're lucky -- incredible photography. It's just not their day job.

Besides, there are lots of professionals who aren't photographers at all but still have to create good photographic images in their work. For many years now I've been in the business of training dentists and other medical professionals in using digital photography in their practice. Yeah, I know, heck of a niche, right? But their need for precise, color-accurate, accessible photography is as demanding as anyone's, maybe more. They will often apologize to me for being such "amateurs" with their camera, but I assure them: they are professionals of a high order, indeed. Labels be damned, lets just pick up a few new skills.

So what is it about some of those bad habits, anyway? Never looking at the camera manual. Screw that; manuals are for pikers. We don't need no stinkin' manuals. Chimping. Are you kidding? That's why I bought a camera with a big honking screen. Centering the subject. Heck, I really don't pay much attention. Relying on a single memory card. Hey, that's why I paid big bucks for a high-speed, high-capacity one in the first place. Post too many photos. Well, ok, you got me on that one. 

I guess it all comes down to a simple metric: bad habits are bad, good habits are good, but lets not get all hung up on them. Creativity requires risk-taking and letting go. Labels are only self-indentifying, and anyway I'm a lot more interested in a good photograph than a good photographer. 

Although I like hanging out with both.

Plato's Travelogues, Part 5 ~

February was a great month. As is my usual habit, I spent my birthday month engaging in as much travel -- and its attendant dissipations -- as I can fit into a scant 28 days, 29 if I'm calendrically lucky. A predictably and delightfully rainy trip to northern California capped it off, and of course I'm left to reflect on the fact that my recent trips have all involved a good deal of rain. This, I'm convinced, is a good thing. It makes for better photographs.

But traveling also demands, of me at least, a healthy dose of delayed gratification. Here's what I mean: I rarely travel with my laptop computer, a generously proportioned 15-inch Macbook Pro. Much as I would otherwise like to, I don't upload any of my pictures until well after the event, and this can be any number of days away. Oh sure, I always do some on my iPhone too, and those I can see and mess with right away. That, too, is a good thing, but the ones I take with my camera -- more contemplative, perhaps -- benefit from a cooling-off period.

There are a couple of reasons for this, the first of which has troubled me since I began shooting with a digital camera.  As much as anyone, I love the excitement, the joy, of seeing a beautiful image unfold in the viewfinder and then tripping the shutter. A quick glance at the LCD screen might even reinforce that feeling. But the excitement felt at the moment of exposure is often not the same as that which happens when the image is opened up and sprawled, naked and cold, on the computer screen. One is a Eureka! moment, the other is a "what do I do now?" one. They are inherently disconnected. Better to give them the advantage of time and avoid being unnecessarily disappointed. I'm sure it's a holdover from my film days, which involved the lengthy process of gathering up the exposed rolls and spending a few days developing the negatives before I could even get to the task of printing them. The inherent delay, the forced separation, was integral to the process. Consciously or not, I took advantage of it.

But the other reason, which I've mentioned in passing a couple times before, has to do with re-discovering an old image, as if to see it for the first time all over again. If I go back over images I took weeks or even months before, those initial responses and expectations are long gone. I get to interpret an image I had previously overlooked and will feel excited about it again, but for entirely different reasons having little or nothing to do with the original intent. I find that supremely satisfying, but then, I often feel the same way about Portland coffee or a good IPA. Or rain.

So maybe it's just me.